


Digging a Hole and Drinking Wine

by KeirMoonrock



Series: Walk On [1]
Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: (CSA Does not stand for Community Supported Agriculture...), Addiction, Adoption, Alcoholism, Angst, CW: Mention of self-harm, CW: mention of suicide, Depression, Dysfunctional Family, Eventual..., Financial Issues, I promise the other parts won’t be this dark, John Lived AU, M/M, Marital Issues, Modern AU, Past/Referenced CSA, Past/Referenced Child Abuse, This whole series is gonna take place between 2019-2022, family au, hurt with eventual comfort, just as a heads up, rated m for dark themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:53:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 36,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27272242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeirMoonrock/pseuds/KeirMoonrock
Summary: Every time Richard Starkey hits rock bottom, he grabs a shovel and he starts digging.Between his crippling alcoholism, his soon to be failing marriage, and the constant threat of his shop going under, he’s fully convinced that nothing could possibly get any worse.But somehow, without fail, and with no mercy each time, it always does.
Relationships: George Harrison/Ringo Starr, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney/Linda McCartney, Zak Starkey/Sarah Menikides, starrison - Relationship
Series: Walk On [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991308
Comments: 31
Kudos: 27





	1. Glass, Water, and Wheat

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been lucky enough that the events described in this work, psychologically speaking, have never happened to me or anyone very close to me.
> 
> While I’m extremely grateful for this, I also understand that I won’t be able to write about such topics with 100% accuracy.
> 
> Still, I’ve been doing and will continue to do my research.
> 
> You should also be advised that this story will contain mentions of suicide and self-harm. While they aren’t the sole focus of the story, they do have a pronounced role.
> 
> If this bothers you at all, or if you feel it would pose a threat to your own well-being, I advise you to click away now.
> 
> Should you feel at all like our main character here, know that you’re not alone—you can reach out for help.
> 
> There are hotlines you can text/call and people you can talk to who can help you figure out what steps to take next. 
> 
> Please prioritize yourself and your health, and without any further ado:
> 
> Enjoy.

It was a hell of a thing to be staring down at that glass. 

The people rushed on by him.

The trains stopped and started up again on their tracks.

And the cash register slammed shut, a sigh escaping whoever it was that had been assigned to it.

But at the end of the day, Ritchie could only focus on that bottle in his hand, his eyes staring down onto that oak-brown glass rim like it would come alive and steal his soul at any moment.

It had been a gift, of sorts, from his employees, a bit of a gag to reference every time he had told them to go out and have fun drinking by themselves.

Maybe they thought it would be funny.

And maybe it was, he thought.

It was little more than glass, water, and wheat, really, a piece of paper slapped over it so that no toddler would mistake it for apple juice.

But that was the thing—he was no toddler.

He was a forty-one year old man with a beard on his face and gray streaks in his hair.

There was no possible way, on Earth or any other planet, that the beer could hurt him.

Not after three full years.

So why then, he wondered, did he feel like his soul was being sucked out of his body as he turned the bottle around in his hands?   
It felt like any control he had of himself was being squeezed out of him, leaving nothing but a shriveled sack of flesh and bones.

But that wasn’t what was happening at all. For goodness sake, saying that would completely discredit his entire recovery!

When he had decided three years ago to get sober, it wasn’t something he had been forced to do—he had wanted it with every ounce in his body, and through his own self-discipline, he had done it.

And in the time since, with all the madness running about him, that discipline had doubled—or maybe even  _ tripled _ .

Dhani’s birth, the death of George’s father, John being shot, his own wedding—that was what had taught him how to manage his emotions.

That was what had taught him that there was no going back to that god-awful way he had been living.

After so much time and time-tested trauma, Ritchie could truly say that it was him in control of what he did—not whatever cheaply-made bottle he had in his hand.

Sighing, if only to give his nerves a rest, he tightened his grip around the glass and took a sip.


	2. A Long and Treacherous Journey (To Put Some Pasta in the Oven)

It took Ritchie a moment to understand that the door had opened.

But it took him even longer to fully recognize that George was standing on the other side of the bed.

“Christ,” he sighed. “Have you even gotten up once?”

Ritchie swallowed, wincing as his saliva trickled through the back of his throat, sending the sour taste of his own bile back through his mouth.

“No,” he murmured, hardly strong enough to even speak.

George shook his head as he dug through the wardrobe, his hands travelling over what few pairs of clean socks there were.

“Do you even know what time it is?” he asked, not so much frustrated as he was disappointed.

Ritchie didn’t answer him.

“Come on, love,” George whispered, the mattress sinking as he pressed his weight down against it. “It’s one in the afternoon; you can’t keep layin’ there.”

Again, the other man said nothing.

There was nothing he could say, he supposed.

And there was nothing he could think.

And there was nothing he could do.

Nothing around him seemed real, in all honesty. 

He felt weightless, and at the same time, his body felt heavy as lead.

His mind felt like someone had filled it with dry ice, which they then doused in gasoline and set on fire, confining the following explosion to the walls of his head.

Pulling his shoes out from underneath the bed, resting his right foot on his left knee, George sighed.

“Listen,” he said. “I have to go get those boxes from Zak and Sarah’s, and frankly, I don’t know when I’m gonna be comin’ back. So it’s gonna be up to you to make lunch.”

“I can’t,” Ritchie moaned, burying his nose into the crook of his elbow, annoyed by the hair covering his eyes and somehow unable to lift his arm and move it.

“Yes, you can,” the other man huffed. “There’s plenty of pasta in the fridge; just toss it in the oven for a couple o’ minutes and you’ll be fine.” 

“I don’t wanna eat.”

George suddenly stopped moving.

“I know that,” he said through slightly gritted teeth. “But you got three kids downstairs that have to. So I don’t wanna hear any m—”

Ritchie mumbled something about being hungover and stared at the dirt in his fingernails.

“For God’s sake, Ritchie, you’re always hungover! But you still get things done, don’t you?”

“It’s different this time…”

“I’m sure it is,” George said, shaking his head. 

For the first time all morning—or—he supposed it was the afternoon by that point, Ritchie turned his head, his eyes landing in no hurry on the man with his hands on his hips by his bed.

Blinking slowly, and speaking a thousand times slower, he said, “It is.”

“Oh, come on,” George cried, exacerbated. “Will you get over yourself? I ain’t askin’ you to go and bench press Dhani, just put some pasta in the oven for him! Please!”

“I can’t get up, though.”

His husband pressed his fingers to his temple.

“Yes,” he sighed “You can. Look, I put the bin out for ye. If you’ve got to sick up, then just do it in there. But for Christ’s sake, Ritchie, just take a shower, put the pasta in the oven, and make sure Dhani doesn’t electrocute himself. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

“You overestimate me,” the other man said after a long pause.

“I fail to see how I’m overestimating you by asking you to do your job. You’re their dad, too, love.”

Ritchie wanted to say something.

But he didn’t have the strength to think of anything.

“Get up,” he sighed. “Use the bin, take a shower, make some pasta. Have you got that much?”

“I mean… I got it, yeah.”

“And can I trust you to do four things?”

Ritchie swallowed, his head throbbing inside his skull.

“That’s up to you.”

“Then I say I can,” George concluded, a slight edge in his voice. “‘Cos it ain’t too much to ask you to do what you’re supposed to.”

Ritchie only stared at him, his eyes blank.

And after a moment of silence, staring at the ground, George added, “I’ll say hi to them for you.”

“Yeah?”

He sighed.

“Yeah. And the baby, too.”

Ritchie hummed something unintelligible.

“I’ll be off now,” George said with a nod. “I’ll see you around.”

“Mm-hm.”

It took Ritchie a moment to notice the door had closed.

And for that matter, it took him a number of moments that can only be expressed in scientific notation to actually remember that George had told him to get up. 

He certainly didn’t want to—his head and limbs felt might as well have been barbells in the state he was in.

What George didn’t understand was that for Ritchie to lift any part of his body, or even to move it out of the fetal position, or move his own hair out of his eyes was a Herculean task.

It physically hurt his head to do, pain seeping through his chest and stomach like hurricane water through a paper towel.

The winds of the storm pulled him back down towards his mattress, like a string had been attached to his heart, the tips of his fingers cold as hail as they kissed the warm sheets.

His mind too exhausted to even think—and somehow still finding a way to make him feel like something that came out of a 3000 stone cow on its ninetieth birthday—his memory let out a faint whimper of a man with his hands on his hips, his voice raspy and jagged as he muttered something about pasta and looking after your own kids.

Ritchie drew in a deep breath.

And with eyes shut tight as bank vaults, his head spinning faster than Mercury around the sun, he sat upright, and doubled over.

If he were a man to care about such things as posture, then he would have been beating himself over the head, his spine arched like something out of an American postcard as he dug his fingertips into his scalp.

It felt like his brains were falling out of his skull, he thought, his head pounding as the mass of white and gray matter pounded against his forehead, begging to be let out.

And his chest felt no better, fear rising in it like someone had just come up from behind him and stabbed him with his own Epi-Pen, the string attached to his heart playing tug-of-war with his body as he fought to keep himself sane.

With a groan, he leaned his weight towards the bin and emptied the contents of his stomach. 

If there was no other motivation he had for trudging into the bathroom—and there really wasn’t—then it was just to get that god-awful taste out of his mouth.

He didn’t bother looking into the mirror as he stepped inside, knowing he would see the same deflated and bone-white face he always did.

But then again, he didn’t bother doing anything once his feet (which he didn’t notice had on them only one sock) made contact with the tile.

For far too long a while, he only stood there, hunched over, his mind on autopilot.

If the autopilot had a voicebox in it playing a loop of jumbled insults, anyway.

He almost didn’t hear it.

But somewhere in the back of his mind, he still knew it was there.

It was like a fog surrounding him, reminding him just how terrible of a person he really was.

He was just some oaf standing hunched over on his bathroom floor, after all.

But after some time, much to his own surprise, he found his skin bare against the air, his fingers pulling at his one single sock as he stared aimlessly at the curtains before him.

He forgot to set out the towels as he dragged the shower curtain along its bar, and as he reminded himself that to shower required water, he cursed himself. 

When at last the pin was pulled to rain forth the liquid, he couldn’t tell how hot or cold it was.

All he knew was that he was cold—unbearably so—and somehow, still breaking a sweat. 

So there was no use in changing the temperature, he thought as his legs gave way beneath him.

It was almost funny, in a very pitiful sort of way—it was one in the afternoon, and Ritchie, having just got out of bed, found himself sitting on the floor in the shower as soon as he stepped inside.

He wondered why he should even bother grabbing the soap, and for that matter, why he had even decided to get himself wet in the first place.

He hadn’t showered in days, sure, but his willpower to maintain socially appropriate hygiene was far outweighed by his lack of willpower to do much more than shove George’s stupid pasta in the oven.

The water wasn’t even warm; it would never be warm enough for him.

And he had no real intention of cleaning any part of himself.

So he just sat there in the shower, staring at the hair on his legs like it was some sort of late-night rerun of a cheesy soap opera for what was somewhere between a half a minute and an eternity.

After deciding he had wasted enough time letting water drip off of his greasy hair, he furrowed his brow, annoyed, and finally stood up, with great pain, to turn off the shower.

While usually this would result in a very cold, very naked, and very wet man standing in an empty tub, begging for a towel to wrap him up and keep him from getting hypothermia, Ritchie just stood there and stared at the ground.

He had left the towels in the closet, after all. 

With little fanfare and little drops of water falling onto the tiles beneath his feet, the man grabbed the first towel he could find and dried himself off, rubbing it against his head like it might knock him unconscious and spare him from his misery.

He then wrapped it around his waist as best he could, murmuring curses to himself on the several occasions it fell, and with a sigh, pulled his hairbrush out of the drawer.

He got four full strokes in before deciding it wasn’t worth the effort—a new record for that blurred man in the fog of the mirror.

And before he stepped out to grab the first somewhat wearable shirt he could, he couldn’t help but think to himself that there was no man behind the fog.

There was only fog, so it was, a picture of someone you saw in a dream once, made of rounded shapes and muted colors, and with the personality of a wet strip of cardboard.

In the end, he decided on an old roll-neck with a hole in the corner, a pair of joggers that were really more abrasive than soft, and a set of socks that he swore he could feel the floor through.

It certainly wasn’t a glamorous look, but you couldn’t expect much from a man who sat down in the tub after not showering for days.

Opening the bedroom door with heavy hands, he winced.

It wasn’t exactly sunny outside—it so rarely was—but without curtains drawn shut to shield him from the light, stepping into the hallway felt like being knocked into heaven.

Which, to be honest, Ritchie would have taken over going downstairs.

His head buzzed as the wood creaked beneath his feet, his eyes noticing, but never taking note of his surroundings.

The TV was on, he noticed.    
But he didn’t care to know who was watching it. 

And so he paid no mind as sounds as colors moved around him, his mind preoccupied with the blinding light of the fridge as he searched for the pasta.

It made his head hurt, he thought.

But it didn’t take him too long to find the bowl, covered with a plastic lid and topped with a piece of tape that said on it, in George’s handwriting:   
  


_ Pasta (Plain) _

He sighed, and pouring the cold, wet noodles into a more oven-friendly bowl, he tossed the leftovers into the oven.

With what little strength he had left, he then dove back into the fridge to set out the sauces.

There were two of them—a red sauce and a cream sauce, as you would expect, their bowls again taped with George’s curled and pointed strokes, labeled correctly, as they always were.

And they were nothing fancy; just your standard, typical, three point five kids and a white picket fence jarred pasta sauces. 

But they were cold.

And the pasta, Ritchie thought with a sigh, his chest swelling with frustration, was going to be warm.

His back ached as he bent down to grab the pots, but the pain didn’t register to him.

He supposed there was only so much of him that could be hurt at once.

And as he set the pots on the stove, lighting the burners as he dumped the contents of the bowls inside, he began to notice a shift in his pain, one from the physical to the emotional.

And, as always, it started with him asking himself what he was doing.

To that, he thought, he had no answer.

How many times, he wondered, had he woken up like that? Lying in his bed with no idea what time it was?

How many days had he set himself down unmoving in the shower, disregarding all common courtesy to throw himself his own pity party?

How many nights had he woken up on the sofa, surrounded by toppled books and trinkets, his hands aching from punching holes in his walls?

And, most importantly, how much longer could he keep it up?

George may have thought otherwise, but believe it or not, the man did have some idea of what he was doing.

He didn’t like it.

But he didn’t know what else to do.

In his own mind, he was digging himself into a hole—growing deeper and deeper with every hangover.

And he knew what waited for him when he finally hit rock bottom—it was becoming inevitable.

George would snap one day and leave, taking the kids along with him, and Ritchie would drink himself to death.

But there was no way to dig himself out. There wasn’t any ladder anyone would toss him—in fact, there wasn’t any ladder at all. 

All there was was him and a shovel.

And he would keep digging until he couldn’t dig anymore, if for no other reason than because he had nothing else to do.

But it seemed cruel to him, ironic, almost, that he should let his shovel speak his last words for him.

And so he had two choices, two paths opened up for him, the likes of which he had stood in between for years.

He could either let himself hit rock bottom and keel over, so it went.

Or he could give himself the last word, because maybe there wasn’t any ladder, and maybe there wasn’t any god above that could save him from himself. But what there was was a shovel in his hand.

If he ever wanted to die with some sense of dignity and be remembered by anyone as more than that bastard that had painted everyone’s white picket fence black, then he had no choice but to hit himself over the head with it.

It could be an uncomfortable thought, sure.

But he knew it to be true that at some point, likely in the near future, he would find himself between a rock and a hard place, stuck in a hundred mile hole that he dug himself into.

And then, the only thing he would be able to do would be to slit his wrists and pray he didn’t feel any pain.

Because that was the real problem—Ritchie had no issue leaving everything and everyone he had ever known behind, but only in theory.

In theory, he was incurable, and his pain was so great that the only choice he had was to end it all.

It would do his family some good, he thought, not having anyone around anymore to set things not only out of balance, but out of gravity.

He would keep himself from hurting anyone else—if he could only bring himself to do it.

That was the problem.

That had always been the problem.

In practice, he was still incurable—but he was a coward.

He was a coward who laid awake in the mornings and thought of his mother’s face when she was told that after so much time, and after so many near misses, her son was really, truly,  _ actually  _ dead.

He was a man with a weak heart and a weaker stomach, the type that outside of his own mind, could never take a knife to himself and watch himself bleed.

He was scared of how it would feel—if it would feel like anything at all, that is.

Maybe it was like a bruise you woke up with. Maybe it happened without you knowing.

But it was just as likely, if that were the case, that it would be more like banging your knee into something, doubling over and gasping in pain as you watched the blood leave your body, helpless.

Ritchie sighed.

It wasn’t that he was planning on doing it any time soon.

It wasn’t even that he was sure he would do it.

But still, when he stumbled down the streets at night to try and find a bus station, his eyes glazed over as his mind melted, he couldn’t help but imagine how good it would feel knowing that he would be putting an end to everything.

And then, when he woke up every morning, he remembered why he couldn’t—at least not yet.

Pulling the oven gloves over his hands, and letting out a groan as he bent down to pull the pasta off of the rack, he wondered whether Zak and Sarah had started to think about names. 

Maybe it was a little early, he thought. There were still six or seven months to go until she popped, but if he knew anything from when Dhani was born, it was that that time would go by a lot quicker than they expected.

But would it move as fast for him?

He wasn’t sure.

All he wanted was to be able to meet the baby, to hold it in his arms at least once and get a picture with it—that way it would have something to remember him by when it grew up.

But after that, he had no idea what he would do.

He supposed he would just have to bide his time until then.

“Hey,” he mumbled. “Who’s watchin’ TV?”

Dhani poked his head up above the edge of the sofa.

“I made lunch,” Ritchie explained. “Can you go get Lee and Jason?”

Looking around for the remote, Dhani nodded.

And as the boy ran upstairs, his siblings’ names stuck to his tongue, Ritchie let out a sigh.

The pasta was made, he thought.

And now that that was done, he would be perfectly free to crawl back in bed, sighing and watching his wall as his mind disconnected from his body.

Just as he muttered his thanks to Dhani for having tried to get the other two (Jason had claimed he wasn’t hungry, and Lee had apparently been too busy with her homework) his phone rang.

The sound wasn’t strictly loud or quiet; it was quite hard to tell where it was coming from.

He turned all around the room looking for it, his eyes darting from tabletops to television stands as he tried to pin down the sound.

“I’ve got it!” Dhani cried, running out into the study.

Ritchie couldn’t help but wonder how in God’s name it got there.

“It’s Grandma Elsie,” the boy said, darting back over to his father with the phone in his hand.

“Oh, hell…” he murmured. “What’s she want?”

Hearing this, Dhani went silent.

And after a moment of deliberation, Ritchie pressed the little red decline button.

“Get yourself a glass of milk or something,” he muttered. “I’m going upstairs.”

Before turning to do just what he said he would, he shook his head.

Elsie would think he was dead in a car wreck if he didn’t answer her, but he was in no mood to hear her talk for forty minutes about Harry’s knee pain.

He wasn’t in the mood to do anything, really.

Not when there was beer to be drunk and sheets to black out on. 


	3. Keep Up and Catch Up

The phone by the cash register hummed, its little light flashing a bright ruby red.

But Ritchie didn’t look over to it as he sorted through the new shipment of guidebooks, organizing them—in what was supposed to be the manufacturer’s job—between violins, violas, cellos, clarinets, flutes, and saxophones.

He was going to have to go and nab a bottle of wine, he thought, if he ever wanted to leave that folding chair.

“Starkey Music and Records,” the cashier-of-the-hour sighed. “This is Julian, how can I... ”

He trailed off.

And it was only then that the old man looked up.

“I’m sorry,” Julian said, the corners of his mouth ticked down in confusion. “Wha—”

He paused, his head drawing so far back Ritchie was convinced his eyes would pop out of his skull.

“Dad?”

The cashier made eye contact with the man, his shoulders shrugging and his eyes wide.

“Well, no, I don’t mean t—”

He paused.

“Hell, I don’t have any opinion on it; I’m just the one closest to the phone!”

His brow understandably furrowed and he bit his lip.

“Yeah,” he sighed, seemingly giving up on arguing as he ran his hand through his hair. “Yeah, I will. Thanks for calling. Have a nice day.”

With rapidly blinking eyes then, Julian hung up the phone.

“Your dad called you?” Ritchie asked flatly.

“I guess so,” the young man sighed. “Said he’s comin’ over to see you. He wanted to give you a heads up.”

“Oh God,” Ritchie groaned, tossing another book into the clarinet pile. “Did I do something?”

“I don’t know; he didn’t really give me any reason. Just said he was on his way.”

He paused before adding with a sigh, “Maybe he broke a string or something. I don’t know.”

“Yeah,” Ritchie grumbled. “Well, he had better be willing to help sort these books if he wants in here.”

Taking a look at his watch, Julian crossed his arms.

“I think I’m gonna get off the register early,” he said. “I’ll switch places with Roshni; have myself a convenient excuse not to see him.”

“That’s fine,” Ritchie sighed. 

Between the books, he really didn’t have much time for the Lennons’ family rivalries.

So he just sat there cursing under his breath for a couple of minutes, realizing with seething frustration that he had misread about half of the viola instruction books as violins.

Roshni came out of the workshop with her hands in her pockets, her eyes cast down towards the floor as she made her way to the cash register.

And then, causing him to finally look up from the mess he’d made, Ritchie heard the familiar sound of the bell above the door, a soft _ding_ letting him know to get everything together as quickly as possible.

“Hey,” John said, a wild grin on his face. “There you are.”

“Sure am,” Ritchie muttered, taking a swig of beer. “Now sit down and help me. If you’re gonna come here with two minutes notice, you’re gonna be put to work.”

“Really?” the other man asked, almost insulted. “I can’t even stop by on my way home?”

Ritchie shook his head.

“Not when you pull somethin’ like this and expect to get away with it.”

Taking a stack of unsorted books from the table, John moaned, “Jesus Christ, Mimi, how’d they turn you into a short old man?”

The shopkeeper only stared at him, annoyed.

“Shut yer trap,” he hissed.

And sensing the tension in the air, for the first time in his life, John did.

After a couple of silent seconds sorting through introductory saxophone scales, he began, “So, what’s today been like?”

“Damn manufacturers can’t keep their own books in line…”

“Lots o’ people comin’ in?”

“There’s you,” Ritchie said, nonchalant.

He couldn’t understand why John laughed, hearing that.

“How about that?” he mused. “Tell you what, next time I’ll bring the wife.”

Ritchie sighed.

“Please don’t.”

“Oh,” John sighed, trying and failing to hit his shoulder. “I’m only joking. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Sure I do.”

He raised his eyebrows, then, squinting at a clarinet book.

“You’d think they’d make the print on these things bigger…” he muttered. 

Ritchie took another sip of his beer.

“You’re awful chatty today,” he noted.

“Usually am.”

“And why’s that?” the shopkeeper asked, annoyed. “You’ve decided to run off with some bird from Swaziland this time?”

“It’s called eSwatini now,” John corrected. “And surprisingly—no. But we’re finally unpacking the china tonight.”

“You brought china with you from New York?”

“It was a gift from Yoko’s sister,” he explained. “We couldn’t sell it.”

Ritchie shook his head.

“You guys are mad.”

John smirked.

“Mad enough to come here and sort books with you.”

“Apparently,” Ritchie sighed. “But I don’t see why.”

“I just wanted to stop by!” John cried, a grin on his face. “That’s it! My God, Ritchie, you sound just like Julian.”

The other man didn’t say anything, and so he continued, “What? Am I not allowed to come and see you? You want me to just pack my bags and run home?”

“If you’re just going to waste my time,” Ritchie hissed. “Then yes. I’ve got things to do, you know.”

“Which is why I’m helping you,” John said with a cocky sort of air about him. “Many hands make quick work, of course.”

Without even missing a beat, the words tumbling out of his mouth before he could even think about them, Ritchie responded, “Sometimes, Johnny, I want to punch you in the face.”

Hearing this, the other man practically cackled.

“Oh,” he sighed. “Not the first time I’ve heard it.”

And then, after a pause, his tone suddenly softening, he added, “But really—how’ve you been doing?”

Ritchie shrugged.

“I’ve been… doing,” he said, having no idea how to answer the question. “What about you?”

“I already told you,” John explained. “We’re unpacking the china—I’m in the prime of my life. But enough about me; tell me about yourself.”

“My name is Richard Starkey,” the man responded dryly. “I’m forty-four, I have four kids—”

“And how are they?” John asked, worming his way into the shopkeeper’s cleverly-created diversion.

“The kids?”

He nodded.

Ritchie paused.

He couldn’t even remember the last time he spoke to them.

“They’re… alright.”

“Yeah?” the other man asked, thumbing through viola exercises.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“And George is doin’ okay?”

Ritchie’s eyes bulged, if only to hide the growing bloom of sorrow in his chest.

His teeth jabbing into his cheek, he muttered, “He’s cheating on me.”

And if John’s eyebrows were in heaven before, his eyes the size of the full moon at night, then hearing this, they were uppercutting God’s chin, his pupils growing to the size of the sun.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “Are- are you sure?”

“It’s funny that you of all people should be so surprised,” Ritchie said, feeling no remorse for what he knew was a low blow on a sensitive subject. “And I ain’t seen him with anyone yet, but I’ve just got a feeling.”

“You go through his phone?”

“No.”

“His email?”

“No.”

“His _anything_?” John asked, his eyes peeking out from above his glasses.

Ritchie set the now well-organized and thoroughly double-checked pile of violin books aside.

“No,” he sighed.

“So to make a long story short,” the other man said, deadpan. “You’ve just got a hunch.”

“Basically.”

“And nothin’ else?”

“I don’t know why you’re asking me when you already know what I’m gonna say.”

John let out a breath.

“Then don’t tell me he’s cheating on you, for God’s sake! You scared me half to death!”

Ritchie frowned—though he hadn’t exactly been smiling before.

“You’re scared of cheating?” he asked. “ _Really_ ?”

“Fuckin’ hell,” John grumbled. “You get hit by a car or something this morning?”

The man wanted to believe he was lying as he said, “I wish I was.”

“Apparently… but honest, Ritch, you can’t just think he’s cheating on you because it feels like he might be.”

“I wouldn’t even blame him,” Ritchie continued, his voice raising in both pitch and volume as he grabbed for another swig of his beer. “God, if I were him, then I would do it, too!”

“Come on—you guys are the ones we live vicariously through, imagining that our relationships are in better states than they really are!”

“Will you shut up?” Ritchie snapped, ignoring the sound of the bell at the door. “Listen, I didn’t let you come in here—unannounced, I should add—to sit here and tell me how to think. If you even want to start with that, then you can get the hell out.”

John sat silent for a moment.

And then, taking in a breath, his voice much more serious, he asked, “You wanna know why I came here?”

“Lemme guess,” Ritchie grumbled. “So you could try and convince me that socialism works?”

John didn’t even joke about it.

And that was how the shopkeeper finally met his eyes, wandering around the room through his glasses as they trailed the customer by the record display.

“Why don’t you come with me?” he asked in a low tone. “I don’t need every so-called musician in Liverpool eavesdroppin’ on us.”

“You’re sayin’ you drove here?” 

“Of course not. But there’s gotta be some better place to do this than…”

He gestured to the space around them.

“On a folding table in your broom closet.”

“Storage room,” Ritchie half-heartedly corrected.

John sighed.

“I don’t buy it. Now come on, there’s got to be somewhere.”

“Julian’s in the workshop now,” Ritchie mumbled. “And I think Zak’s upstairs.”

“Somewhere without people?”

The shopkeeper shrugged.

“God, I don’t know. Theo inn’t here today, and he usually takes his smoke break around now, so the alley’s prob’ly free.”

“Then we’re going to the alley,” John grunted, standing up from his chair. “You can sort out the rest of the books some other time; this is important.”

Taking his friend’s hand and using it to lift himself up, Ritchie uttered, “It had better be.”

Of the both of them, the shopkeeper was the only one to shiver as they stepped outside.

It wasn’t raining, necessarily, but there was still water in the air.

It was misting, he concluded, and for all he cared, it was cold enough outside to give him frostbite.

But John didn’t seem bothered by it, walking into the alleyway, the stench of stale cigarette smoke filling his nose.

He only put his hands on his hips and waited for Ritchie, who followed him soon after with already rosy cheeks.

“What’s the matter?” John asked, smiling. “You can’t keep up with the cold?”

Ritchie’s response was swift and plain.

“No.”

The other man laughed, a wistful sort of humour to him as he taunted, “Lord, you wouldn’t last a single day in New York! You’d be a popsicle by the time you left the airport!”

Crossing his arms as he neared John, Ritchie sighed, “I’m sure I would be. Now for God’s sake, what have you got to say so bad?”

His friend nodded slowly, his eyes drawing up to the top window of the house in front of them. 

“You said you wanted to know the real reason I came here?” he asked.

Ritchie didn’t bother to try and figure out what he was looking at as he grunted, “Well, I don’t want you to lie to me.”

“Figured as much,” John mumbled. “So if you really want to hear it, here it is—”

He drew in a breath, and then, meeting the shopkeeper’s eyes, in a no-frills, plain and simple sort of way, he said, “I’m worried about you.”

If Ritchie could feel anything at all—anything other than his ever-present sense that everything around him was wrong, anyways—he almost would have been upset by the notion.

But it hardly surprised him in the state he was in, and so all he could manage to pull out of his mouth was, “Don’t be.”

“I’ve got to. You may not believe it, but I do consider you my friend. I think I’ve got a right to be worried about you every now and then.”

“I don’t see why.”

“And I know that. But we all can—hell, it doesn’t take more than a minute to figure out, just by looking at ye—you’re not doin’ good.”

Ritchie’s cheeks grew hot.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

John sighed.

“It means we’re worried about you, you bastard. Listen, I saw you drinkin’ in there, and I—”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Ritchie cried, the sorrow in his chest having morphed into something much darker. “My drinkin’? Just tell me honestly—did George put you up to this?”

“No,” John said, raising his voice a bit. “I’m doing this because I d—”

“What are you doing?” the shopkeeper asked. “Really, John, think about it. You’ve been gone for how many years now, and you’ve just come back, and the first thing you do is start lecturin’ me about my drinking? My God, how many months have you even been here? And you’re already tearin’ into me?”

“Ritchie, come on—”

“Just go and unpack your fucking china, for God’s sake! How hard is it to do that?”

“ _Ritchie_ ,” John commanded, his cheeks flushed in anger. “Just listen to me, you git! I’ve been there!”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

He pinched his thumb and forefinger together between his eyebrows.

“Maybe you forgot,” he sighed, his voice so soaked with petty sarcasm that Ritchie could almost taste it. “But I’ve been in your shoes before. I know you don’t _think_ you have a problem, but you do. You don’t see it—not because you’re stupid, but because it’s fried your brain—but everyone around you can.”

Ritchie opened his mouth to speak.

But John practically smuggled him, saying, “I’ll be honest with you, Ritch—’cause maybe no one else has been. You have a serious problem with alcohol, and you need help, and you’re makin’ yourself look like a bit of an idiot.”  
“Yeah, that’s me,” he sighed, annoyed. “I’m the idiot here, aren’t I?”

“Honestly? Yeah. And I have no issue telling you that, because you know what? I was that idiot not too long ago.”

“But not now, huh?”

“Well, of course not! I’m still quite empty-headed, really, but the difference is that I have enough common sense now to understand that I was even more of an idiot when I was strung out on heroin! My God, I’m sure you remember better than I can—I was a total prick!”

“Will you j—”

“Listen,” John said quickly, “I know I haven’t been here too long, and I get why you’re mad about it, but I think I’ve been here long enough to know that you’re drinking _way_ too much, and it’s seriously messing you up. You’re fightin’ with George now—for heaven’s sake, you think he’s cheating on you! You ain’t shown up to anything since I got here—”

“Maybe because I have a fucking business to run?” the shopkeeper spat.

John seemed to ignore this.

“Have you _seen_ George?” he asked, his eyebrows carving deep wrinkles in his forehead. “You’d think someone just told the guy that every home and garden store in Liverpool was going out of business!”  
“Oh, so you _have_ been talkin’ to him, haven’t you?”

“Yes!” John cried. “Of course I have; he’s my friend! And you know, Paul talks about him—”

“‘Cos why wouldn’t he?” Ritchie asked cynically.

“He’s not doing good,” John sighed. “You’ve got to listen to me, man, he’s at his wit’s end with you.”

“And I’ll be at my wit’s end with him when I get home,” the shopkeeper retorted, wishing with everything he had that he had brought his beer with him. “If he’s really got the nerve to go out and talk shit about me to you guys.”

“He ain’t talkin’ shit!” John cried. “God, you can’t blame him for bein’ angry when all you do is sit on your ass on make him do shit for you! He’s stressed, and for heaven’s sake, he’s got to tell _someone_ about it. I’m tellin’ you, man, one of these days, if you keep on yelling at him every night while making him be the one to take care of _your kids_ , he’s gonna snap!”

“Wouldn’t be yellin’ at him if he wasn’t so far up on his high horse all the time.”

The other man let out a sharp breath.

“Ritchie,” he sighed. “I’m not gonna fight you.”

Ritchie tossed his head back.

“Oh, well you’re doin’ a good job at that, aren’t you?”

John’s eyes shut tight, his mouth curled into a deep frown as he raised his eyebrows, and taking another breath, continued, “You know, I see a lot of myself in you.”

He paused.

“You talked about thinkin’ George is cheating on you. You’re mad at him for just… everything. You’re mad at him for just bein’ in the same room as you. And maybe you don’t think it’s that bad, but I’ll tell you what—it takes an addict to know an addict, and it takes a divorcee to know a divorcee.”

Ritchie’s cheeks grew hot, his whole body filling with acid as his instinct to defend himself kicked into gear.

“It’s like me and Cynthia, I think,” the man muttered. “If you remember all that.”

Shaking his head, clearly uncomfortable at the thought, John continued, “Tell me—don’t you remember a time when you weren’t the grumblin’ drunk showing up at his door every night?”

“What the fuck kind of a question is that? Of course I do.”

“I figured as much. And you remember when you used to… I don’t know, kind of _like_ George? Which is sort of why you married him?”

“Oh, cut that out,” the shopkeeper hissed, the question hitting him like a sack of bricks. “For God’s sake, John, he’s not gonna divorce me.”

It was a bit of a lie, of course, considering Ritchie knew it was going to happen someday.

But there was something so different about hearing John say it.

Seeing that the other man was growing increasingly angry, John sighed, “My point is—you can get that back. I know it’s not fun—hell, you remember the first time, don’t you.? But it’s possible. You just have to be willing to put in the effort.”

“Come on, it’s not that b—”

John raised an eyebrow.

And his chest growing heavy with rage, Ritchie just shut his mouth.

He had no desire, after all, to see the grin on that bastard’s face when he said the four words John was waiting for him to say.

“Believe it or not,” John said. “I don’t like seein’ you and George tear each other apart. You guys are the ones that I vicariously live through, remember?”

If Ritchie said anything, or even unpursed his lips, he was just about certain he would scream.

“Consider this an intervention,” the other man concluded. “If you want to call it that. My only point—and the whole reason I came here actually—is that you’ve changed since the last time we met, and I think you ought to know that.”

“Since New Year’s?” Ritchie asked, his voice strangled.

John shook his head.

“I mean—before we moved. Let me think, the last time we saw each other; that would have been…”

He snapped his fingers.

“Your wedding, that was it.”

Just for making him think of that night, Ritchie wanted to slam the man’s head into the bricks.

“You’ve really changed since then—and not in a good way. You know, you just… you’re fightin’ with George, and you’re drinkin’ all the time, and you’re bangin’ on the door at night. Call me crazy if you want, but when I look at all that, I have to think to myself—it _is_ that bad.”

He paused, and then, with a slight frown on his face, he said, “Let me ask you something, Ritchie, ‘cos I really don’t think enough people ask this question, and that’s quite a shame—why’d you start drinking the way you did? And for that matter, why’d you start doin’ it again? What happened?”

Without missing a beat, in a low, frigid tone, Ritchie muttered, “Get the fuck out of my shop.”

“I’m not tryin’ to interrogate you or nothin’,” John replied. “You don’t have to lie down and tell me about your mother—it’s just a question.”

Ritchie raised his voice then, anger swelling in his chest like someone had turned his ribcage into the bottle for a molotov cocktail. 

He wanted to scream until he could taste his own blood boil in his mouth, to beat the man in front of him until he was black and blue.

And more than anything, he wanted to yell at him, if only for stirring up those most vulnerable of emotions Ritchie swore he would never let himself feel. 

He wanted to yell at him for dragging him from his work—because while he hated it, and while he would have cussed out whoever had been in charge of putting those books together, he had to admit that dividing musical instruction books into piles was an excellent way to keep himself from wondering how it would feel to push a silver knife into his blackening heart. 

He wanted to yell at him for having had the audacity to stroll back into town and start picking apart his every action, because that was what John always did—he would do something stupid, disappear for a little while, and then come back swinging, absolutely convinced that he was the one in the right, and holding 92 theses against whoever he was mad at that day in his arms. 

But try as he might, Ritchie found he was unable to say anything more than, “Fuck off.”

“I just want you to think about it.”

“And I just want you to get the hell out of my shop,” he flamed, his fingers twitching with anger. “For God’s sake, you might as well just go back to New York. See if I give a damn.”

“I would go if Yoko’d let me,” John sighed, annoyed. “But someone ought to talk to to you, and if there was anyone who could help, I thought maybe it would be someone who’s been in your shoes. So sue me.”

“And someone ought to punch you in the nose,” Ritchie cried. “I tell you what, there’s not much keepin’ me from doin’ it myself, if you wanna ask for it so nicely.”

“Violence is never the answer, Ritch.”

“And naggin’ me out into the alley is?”

John shook his head.

“Listen, man, I can’t help you if you don’t want to be helped, and I ain’t gonna talk to you if you don’t feel like hearin’ what I have to say. I’m not gonna b—”

“Then go to the goddamn bus stop and whine to Yoko about it.”

“You want me to?” John asked, his shoulders slumping in emotional exhaustion.

“What do you think, you git? Of course I do!”

“Then just know one thing,” he sighed, squeezing past the shopkeeper to the other end of the alley.

And once he was there, standing at the edge of the car lot, he turned around and looked him in the eye.

“You keep this up, Ritchie, and sooner or later it’ll catch up with you, alright? I’m not tryin’ to scare you straight or nothin’, but that’s how it is. You keep this up, and it’ll kill you.”

He let out a long, slow breath.

And before he turned around, he muttered, “If you ever do feel like talkin’, you know my number. I’ll be waiting on you. Until then—think about it.”

As the man walked out of sight, his figure disappearing behind a corner as he made his way to the bus stop, Ritchie slammed his fist into the wall.

The pain in his knuckles was immediate, like a bolt of lightning shooting through his arm, but in the cold—which in his anger, might as well have been the dead center of the Arabian Desert—with his mind and heart soaked in bitter wine, the horrible numbness in his hand was almost a relief.

Grabbing gently onto his tensed palm with his other hand, he let out a small cry.

What John didn’t know, walking out of that alleyway, was that it wouldn’t be the dirt in his hole that suffocated Ritchie.

It would be himself.

Not even bothering to remind himself of the baby coming in five months, he wondered what John’s face would look like—showing up at his funeral and realizing he had been wrong in predicting who (or really, _what_ ) would win the war for the shopkeeper’s soul.

His soon-to-be-bruised hand shaking like a twig in a spring storm, he pushed open the shop door, and the ringing of the bell echoing in his head, he sat down before his piles of guidebooks.

But all he could bring himself to do, sitting there, was lean his head back and finish his can of beer. 


	4. Shadows of the Stupored Mind (The Demise of the Space Dog)

The living room was dark as the wine in Ritchie’s glass as the television buzzed, people shaking their heads and raising their voices on the blindingly bright screen as the pundits spat back an endless loop of the network’s specially-curated opinion on everything that had ever and would ever happen. 

He was annoyed by this, of course—he was annoyed by nearly everything that day—but in light of the circumstances, he didn’t seem to notice his own distaste for the contrast.

The only thing he was focused on was his drunken stream of consciousness.

If you want to call it that.

Sitting there in the dark, light from the kitchen seeping in behind the sofa, his eyes seemed to glaze over, a perpetual frown on his face under a forever furrowed brow as his chest rose and fell.

Behind him, below all the clamor amongst the anchors and pundits, the only sound to be heard was that of the water in the sink, dripping slow as honey from a jar on every third beat.

And still, he seemed completely numb to his surroundings, likely because he was too busy digging his hole.

In that inebriated state of his, slight grumbles escaping his lips every now and then, he seemed to lose what little shreds of logic he had, having sold his brain to the bottle of wine at his side—his third that night.

But much to the relief of those shuffling their feet on the carpet around and above him, he hadn’t yet reached the climax of his nightly freakshow.

That is to say, he was not yet at that point of drunkenness where he would begin to punch the walls, kick the furniture, yell so loud he lost his voice, and smash more plates than a kid having a seizure at a Greek wedding.

The keyword there is  _ yet _ , of course.

And while there was still quite some time before the first bottle fell to the floor (for those nights there was wine in the house, it would usually be after all of it had been drunk and the man had moved onto beer, sacrificing his third or fourth can to the carpet) it would not take long for the first skirmish to start—as everyone would soon find out.

But there  _ was  _ some time to kill before then, so the perfectly-postured statues of Radha and Krishna in the corner dictated. 

And so the man simply let his mind wander to its pitch-black mansion in the dark.

Him and Jason had gotten into an argument at dinner that night—an unwelcome change of pace from the usual quiet meals the family had together, at which Ritchie was present 45% of the time—and though he should have been much more preoccupied with the nature of the conflict, all the drunk man could think about was the look on the lad’s face as he slouched in his chair. 

He seemed to Ritchie like he was pretending to be the crown prince for a day, raging like a broken record for the third time that week that he wasn’t going to eat his dinner.

In all honesty, crown prince was a bit of an exaggeration, because somehow, the young man grew upset with things that typically bothered a five year-old child, and at the same time, he expressed this displeasure with the vocabulary of a fifty-five year old Irish sailor. 

All with the defiance of the eighteen year-old boy that he was.

Ritchie sighed, frustrated at the mere memory of the conflict.

At some point, he struggled to remember, Jason had just shoved his chair into the table (and nearly into Lee’s arm) not even bothering to pick up his plate, and slammed his door like his life depended on it.

It was at about that point, of course, that Ritchie had done the same thing— though he retreated to the couch—and had somehow decided that the only way to soothe his frayed nerves was to watch political debates on the television.

This left George behind him to clean up the table, Dhani to follow the former around until he was forced to go and start his homework, and Lee to disappear into the shadows.

In other words, it was a typical dinner in the Starkey household.

And just as typical as the traumatic events that lentil soup had to witness that evening were Ritchie’s immediate thoughts afterwards.

Because as the TV buzzed in front of him and George loaded spoons and bowls into the dishwasher behind him, Dhani still sitting at the table as he asked in low tones about the planets, the man’s mind never turned to face them—in fact, there wasn’t a single thought to be spared for them.

Instead, as it so often did, his mind turned into a mirror, and the only thing he could see was himself.

He didn’t have any good reason why, but looking inside, as wine sloshed around inside his gut, Ritchie heard the echoes of that familiar stream of self-directed insults.

Now, he was too exhausted to discern exactly what those insults were, and for that matter, too stupid, but what he could be sure of, with what little brains he had, could be stated simply as this:

He felt like shit.

His head felt too heavy for his neck with his mind swelling inside, rocking back and forth as he lost sense of whether the floor beneath him was solid. 

His eyes stung from the sharp light of the harsh advertisements on the television, begging him in subtle and not-as-subtle ways to waste his time watching  _ Talking Movies  _ and  _ Sportsday _ , which only served to annoy him more.

And his heart still felt like someone had had bound it in chains, his skin itching in all of his frustration, like he was allergic to everything around him.

The screen was too bright.

The room was too dark.

His rings were too tight.

His son was too childish.

He was too reckless.

And he hadn’t had nearly enough booze to make his mind shut down completely.

That was the real problem, he managed to think somewhere in the back of his head. No matter how many times he blacked out and woke up in the least-appropriate rooms of the house (or outside of it) he would never get enough to satisfy him.

He would never get enough wine to knock him out cold on the kitchen floor.

It would have been an awfully convenient thing, really, if alcohol was the same sort of drug as heroin, and if he was the same type of idiot John had labelled his former self to be.

The nice thing about heroin—though his favorite couple of artists attached at the hip a few streets away would be quick to tell him there was no such thing—was that if you had enough of it, it would just knock you dead; the problems that came with using it in place of feeling solved themselves naturally.

But alcohol was a special breed of a drug, and not only because it was one of the few that could be drunk.

The thing that made it so terribly special was, ironically enough, the same thing that made Ritchie so terribly at a loss for himself—you could drink as much as you want, and even then, the only thing you could do was to drink more, to ruin your life more, to further your debt, to take a sledgehammer to your marriage.

Ruling out alcohol poisoning, which his intoxicated mind very foolishly decided was a rather small-scale issue, there was no amount of whiskey that could send a man to hid immediate grave. 

And in the same vein, there was no amount of willpower—at least not yet—that the man could ever muster to send himself to Hell.

So what he and alcohol had in common—other than being obsessed with one another like it was nobody’s business—was that they were both chicken, standing at the edge of a straight, sheer cliff with their toes pushed just barely over the clouds, too afraid to jump.

So all they did was wait for someone to push them.

And if no one was going to do that, at least not to Ritchie, then the only thing that they  _ could  _ do was push his buttons.

Enter Dhani.

Ritchie was aware he was somewhere behind him, his footsteps small and quick as he exchanged pleasant conversation with Lee.

But, as was so often the case, he could hear, but he couldn’t listen.

In his state of mounting fear for the future, he was too concerned with his own thoughts to take note of anyone else’s.

But in hindsight, he probably should have paid more attention.

Like a tiger pouncing on its prey, before Ritchie had the time to process anything, the boy tip-toed to the side of the sofa and swung his body onto it, appearing in a seemingly spontaneous fashion beside the drunken man, his legs crossed swami-style as he held tightly onto a piece of paper.

The man drew back, realizing his son was there.

But before he could open his mouth to speak—and before Lee could stop him—Dhani gave a bashful smile, the sort he gave to strangers in the park.

“Hello,” he practically whispered.

Ritchie blinked.

“What?”

The boy stared at the ground, his fingers toying with the corner of the paper as he explained, “I’ve got somethin’ to show you…”

His father didn’t respond.

And drawing his eyes to the television screen, his cheeks slightly flushed, Dhani continued, “Lee and Baba said ‘s really good, even if I don’t really believe ‘em, so I just kinda thought you might wanna see.”

Ritchie grumbled something even he couldn’t understand.

And turning his gaze back to him, his eyes wide in that very particular way only children can manage, the boy held tighter onto his piece of paper.

Lee froze behind him.

“Um…” he whispered. “Here you go.”

Without any further ado, then, he pushed his arms out in front of Ritchie’s face, causing the man to instinctively push him away.

At the feeling, the boy’s face fell, but much to his sister’s horror, he was not deterred, explaining with quick, lisped words, “It’s a space dog I drew; you can tell ‘cos... he’s got a helmet on, like the ones you wear in space. And he’s got the flag on it and everything—expect Baba says I forgot about the Irish cross. So I don’t really know where he’s from, but...”

He paused.

“Do you like it?”

Ritchie gave no answer, his eyes slightly squinted as he tried to focus on the blonde-haired woman talking about the impact of Brexit on the European economy. 

“Dad?” Dhani asked, quieter. 

Hearing no response, then, he pointed at the drawing.

“He’s- he’s goin’ to the moon, Da,” he said, a waver in his voice. “You see that? Look, he’s standin’ up on a spaceship and everything.”

The tips of Ritchie’s fingers dug into the glass of his wine bottle, his tongue stuck between his teeth as he swore he could hear his brain being fried in a skillet.

“And he’s got a little cat with him, too—she’s, um, she’s his friend. And I know she looks like Sean’s cat, but she’s not. It’s a different cat, and, um, she went outside the spaceship and started floatin’ around, so now the space dog has got to—”

“Great,” Ritchie said unenthusiastically, his chest tightening until his ribs pressed deep enough into his heart to leave an impression.

The boy’s face fell, and behind him, Lee could only wring her hands.

“Do… do you not like it?” Dhani asked, confused. “Or…”

“Will you just go?” his father hissed.

Dhani pursed his lips.

“You didn’t say if you liked it, though.”

After a pause, he added, “You did see it, didn’t you? You saw the space dog?”

“ _ Yes _ ,” Ritchie grumbled. “Now will you get out of here, for God’s sake?”

“But…” 

The boy frowned.

“Dad, you didn’t tell me what you think of it!”

Oil sputtering in the cavities of his skull, Ritchie tore the paper away from him.

“Do you wanna know what I think?” he asked, the edge of the waxy stars brushing against his beard. “Really?”

As Lee called out in vain to try and stop the man, Dhani’s cheeks grew red as wine.

“I— I don’t know!” he cried, too scared to reach out and try to take his drawing.

In front of his own two eyes then, as he watched in awful anticipation, his father curled the drawing through his hands, wrinkling his carefully-constructed stars and planets in one fell swoop, and like it wasn’t something he had spent hours working on, crumpled it into a ball and flung it across the room.

“I think someone ought to tell you not to be so annoying,” Ritchie spat. “Shut yer trap every one in a while, how ‘bout that? Anyone ever said that to you?”

Dhani’s eyes squinted as he blinked back the tears.

“Some of us have got things to do,” the man continued. “And by God, I don’t wanna see your stupid drawings. That’s the kinda thing you show your Baba, you hear? Show Lee and Jason; I don’t give a damn. But keep me out of it, for heaven’s sake!”

It took a moment for the reality of the situation to hit Dhani—or the both of them, really.

There was a part of Ritchie, somewhere deep down so far he couldn’t seem to figure out where it was, that suddenly felt bruised, that bled like the Dickens as he watched his son’s face grow blotchy and red, that ripped open like a newspaper caught on the street in a storm as Lee screeched at her father, hurling curses and warnings that Ritchie didn’t seem to hear.

Dhani slunk away from the sofa with a sniffle, murmuring quick, quiet, too-little-too-late apologies on loop as his sister grabbed a gentle hold of his arm. 

“Come on,” she murmured, her chest heaving in anger. “We’re going to go see Baba.”

“But— but I have to get my drawing!”

Before he could finish his protest, Lee was dragging him up the stairs.

And his muscles still tense, their fibers still pulled as taught as a stale piece of taffy, his brain still swimming in a grease fire, Ritchie stood up and drew his hands to his neck as he paced.

George would be down any minute, he thought, his brow furrowed and his nose held high in the air as he chewed out his husband for the nth night that week.

The thought of his smug face alone made the man want to smash his bottle of wine over his head, but coupled with his memories of Lee and Jason’s hostility, it made him want to speed his car off of the Royal Albert Dock.

Of all people, he wondered, his eyes caught on George’s most revered statues in the corner, why was it him that the universe was against?

Why was it him who had to end up in the family that loathed him?

Though it didn’t cross his mind at the time, nor when George came downstairs with his hands on his hips, nor when he stormed out of the room shouting at Ritchie to get his act together, nor as the man knocked tupperware out of the fridge as he searched for a beer, nor as he stumbled around the kitchen kicking the walls half-heartedly, nor as he turned off the television and stared into the black abyss before him—a much better question to ask was this:

Why did his family loathe him in the first place?

As he drew his shaking hand to his mouth for what would be his last sip before he blacked out, Ritchie circumvented the answer.

Nothing was all that bad, he thought.

Jason would be fine, given some time; Dhani would be fine.

Everyone would be perfectly, unequivocally fine.

It was only the shadows of his stupored mind playing tricks on him, whispering in his ear that he was nearing the bottom of his hole, and that soon enough, the ground would fall out from under him. 

The shadows were menacing, sure, and seemed awfully large on the wall.

But in reality, they were much, much smaller.

And John, whose words Ritchie could hardly remember, but knew he had spoken to at some point in the past—well, to put it simply, his opinion was worth nothing.

The man was blind, for heaven’s sake.

Why should he be one to see the shadows any clearer?

Ritchie chuckled for the first time in ages, bringing his unsteadied pendulum of emotions full-circle.

Nothing was all that bad at all.


	5. Tatia and the Paper Touch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Mention of past child abuse/neglect (including CSA) 
> 
> Again, not a central point of the story, but if this bothers you, please take heed.

“Have you— have you got her?”

The first thing Ritchie thought as his son placed the girl gently in his arms was that she was awfully warm.

“Oh, yes.”

This was to be expected—she had been swimming around in the womb for nine months, of course, and now that she was out, she had been folded up into a blanket like a little doner kebab, her head peeking out of the bean-shaped package as she slept.

Zak tilted his head, smiling.

“How about that?” he asked.

“How about what?”

She was heavier than she looked, coming in at about three kilograms, but cradling her head in his arms, George grinning beside him as for the first time in ages, he wrapped his arm around Ritchie’s shoulder, his hand pressed gently against his back as he stared down at the girl, Ritchie felt a strange sort of peace, a natural kind of comfort he had all but forgotten.

“It’s Tatia and her granddad,” his son remarked. “For the very first time. How about that?”

She did look a little like a Tatia, he thought to himself, a slight smile crossing his face.

If she looked much like anything at all, of course.

Her eyes were closed, a slight pout on her chin as her tiny chest rose and fell inside the blanket, her hands sticking out just enough to be able to cup her flushed cheeks.

She looked absolutely serene, like she knew that for that moment, the only thing she had to do was sit there and look pretty, to sleep and listen as her uncles, aunt, and grandfathers gushed over her.

“You reckon she likes ye?” George asked, his eyes meeting those of his husband.

Ritchie blinked.

“I think so, yes.”

And hearing this, Jason let out a chuckle.

“Let’s hope it stays that way.”

The man frowned, unsettled by the notion.

Good thing there was a baby in his arms to distract him from himself.

Her whole life, so far, had led up to that point, sitting there with her granddad, and it was almost as though she understood that.

She was doing exactly what she was meant to do, and around her, her family did the same.

The only thing they had to do, after all, was look after her.

They only had to give her love and affection—to rock her when she needed rocked, to feed her when she needed fed, and to give her help when she needed it.

And while it sounded simple enough on paper, the sad reality was that not every person in the world with brains enough to take their pants off was able to adequately take care of the child that they themselves had made.

That, of course, was the reason three out of the four Starkey children had ended up being siblings—their birth parents were, especially in their true parents’ minds, not so nice to them.

This affected each of them to varying degrees, taking into consideration the age they were when they were removed from their birth parents’ care, the severity of their parents’ not-so-nice actions, and the specific ways these actions were then handled or dealt with by the state.

And while it was not a contest of who had come from the most broken home—such a thing would be downright cruel, after all—it was more than clear that there were some among them who had had it tougher than others.

Jason was the first to come into the mens’ care, stepping into the house for the first time at the ripe old age of four with little memory of where he had been before.

So all the official documents stated, he was born out in Blackburn to a mother hardly over the age of sixteen, and for the first two years of his life, lived there with the help of his biological grandparents, his birth father being—unsurprisingly—completely absent from his life. 

At some point in that second year, however, his mother had the brilliant idea to conveniently misplace her child, absolving her responsibility to actually take care of him by, in what was surely a move worthy of a nobel prize, taking him out to the laundrette with her, and then leaving while he wasn’t looking.

After a short dispute between her parents, he was then placed in foster care, and after about a year living with another woman, Jason arrived in front of that blue-doored house in Orrell Park.

He was adopted before he even reached his fifth birthday.

And then there came Lee—a more sour sort of story in comparison to her brother. 

And while there was no such thing as the suffering olympics, it was well-known among the family that of the plethora of stories from the days before, Lee’s were the most disturbing to most people. 

Little was known about her mother; she had apparently left the family early on in the girl’s life.

But there were plenty of things to say about her father—if you were allowed to use such colorful language.

To put it mildly:

There was empathy for those suffering, and there was empathy for those who expressed such a thing by causing suffering to others. 

But there was a certain subset of people, to which a particular Mr. Derek Cruikshank belonged, that in the eyes of many God-fearing folks (or for that matter, most people who knew that the sky was blue) were absolutely irredeemable.

We’ll say, for our purposes, that through a series of vile and downright cruel incidents, Mr. Derek Cruikshank was at last discovered to be having a quite shockingly inappropriate affair against his bygone wife.

This would bother little to no one, of course.

If his mistress was not Lee’s older sister.

Who was pregnant at the age of eleven.

Again, he was quick to find himself childless and in prison for a very long time, which most people would applaud as being a very good thing.

And every member of the Starkey family was in this camp.

But there was no pretending that her father’s long concrete holiday set her and her sister’s lives completely back to normal.

Hell, for the two of them, there had never  _ been  _ a normal to go off of. 

And so, when Lee had arrived at that blue-doored house in Orrell Park at the age of five, her sister and her having been separated beforehand, to be taken care of by—in what was  _ painfully  _ ironic, and really, almost tragic—two men, she had been quite an interesting child.

Even as she sat in the maternity ward, only a few months away from her fifteenth birthday, there were still holes in her bedroom wall.

Jason still had a scar on his arm—though even he couldn’t remember where it was—from that fated day he and Mary McCartney had tried to play tag with the girl.

And she still drove downtown with her Baba every other month to speak to her therapist.

The pressure George and Ritchie had been under in that first year, which they quickly discovered they were ill-prepared for, was enough to make David Bowie and Freddie Mercury blush. 

It got so bad, at points, that the two had talked at length and with great sincerity about surrendering her to another, more fitting foster family. 

But through some miracle, which George attributed to only the highest of beings, the girl began to slowly mellow out.

And after two years, when she was just shy of seven years old, she became the second child to stand smiling on the courthouse stairs with George and Ritchie Starkey.

It was about that time, of course, or maybe even a little before that, that they had taken in their third foster child, who upon arrival to that blue-doored house, had such a thick Welsh accent that his foster siblings were convinced he was speaking a language strange enough to make J.R.R. Tolkien roll in his grave.

In his own words, he was from the middle of “Buck Nowhere upon Ye Hill” in Northern Wales, born under suspicious circumstances to Miss Nicole Parish and—though there was much debate about it—Mr. Scott Hawkings. 

Sad as it was, though, Zak knew very little about the two of them.

For as long as he could remember, and likely since before he was even born, the both of them had had a very serious addiction to methamphetamines, and as a result, spared little time for the child they had had together.

No, they were preoccupied with other things—not only the consumption and subsequent recovery from their drug of choice, but also its creation.

The boy formerly in their care, now a grown man, chose not to speak of them very often—for obvious reasons—but there were certainly consequences of his chaotic upbringing.

After all—he, out of all of his siblings, had been the oldest at the time Ritchie and George took him in, arriving at the pale blue door when he was all of eleven years old.

He had been in foster care for a good year or two before that, of course.

But the homes he had previously been placed in, at least in his mind, weren’t much better than the one he had been born in.

For what was—even as he sat in that hospital room—the majority of his life, he had been neglected and forced to fend for himself in the world.

And so when he had arrived, his behavior was hardwired to accomplish one goal: survival.

Though his problems weren’t as stressful to the men as Lee’s were, there was no denying that they existed and were quite serious.

Even after they had adopted him, he was prone to steal and hoard food, build a hundred-foot wall around his heart, drink instead of feel anything, lash out at his siblings, break down as soon as someone raised their voice, and squirm at another person’s touch.

And even after they had taken him in, gotten him into therapy, and legally adopted him, he still had to cope with the decisions his mother made for him while he was still in her womb, taking his medicine every morning and every night to manage his ADHD, likely given to him by the poor choices of the pregnant Miss Parish.

He was thirteen by the time the men had stood on those courthouse steps with him.

And it wasn’t out of hesitance that they waited so long to do so, but rather, out of necessity.

Though it caused quite the controversy in the household, what with Zak having a fundamental need and an unshakable selfishness for the attention he was to receive from his (foster) parents, it was around that same time that George was finally able to fulfill his lifelong dream and have a biological child of his own.

The strings were all in place, they had been talking to a surrogate mother for months, and after nearly ten years, the two had saved up enough to afford to have a child via surrogacy in the U.S.

There was only one thing left to do.

And that was for Richie to get sober.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do—it never was, of course.

But when you’re too proud to let anyone see you struggle, it’s twice as hard.

And there, sitting in that room with its cold white walls and crisp green curtains, his one leg resting on the other as George pressed his hand up against his back, both of their eyes focused on the sleeping baby girl in Ritchie’s arms, he couldn’t help but be reminded of that morning in Los Angeles seven years ago where he had done the exact same thing.

He hadn’t gone as far as George back then, who let the tears fall unabashedly from off of his cheeks, but it was an understatement to say he had been moved by the scene—by the perfect sight that was his newborn son. 

He had thought to himself, sitting in the California sun, that for once in his life, he really had something to be proud of.

If he couldn’t have ever been proud of who he was, or the things he had done, or the blood that ran through his body, so the thinking went, then at the very least, he could be proud that he had made it long enough to be able to hold his son (and his weeping husband) without a drop of liquor in his belly.

Though they hadn’t perfect at the time, he had been working on his relationships with his family, slowly and steadily rebuilding the trust that was lost through  _ his  _ lies and  _ his  _ issues.

And the beautiful thing about staring into the hairy little mess that was the newborn Dhani, he remembered thinking, was that the boy would have every reason to trust him.

He would grow up without remembering the time his father had broken down and shaved off all his hair (eyebrows included) if only to keep his wrists intact.

He would never have to lie awake at night and think about all of those nights his father had spent slumped over and passed out on the sofa—if he could even make it that far.

And there would never be a single doubt in his mind, from the front to the back, that his father loved him.

Because why wouldn’t Ritchie love Dhani?

It was Dhani, after all, who saved his father’s life.

But tilting his head, his cheeks slightly flushed as he watched Tatia squirm about inside her swaddle, all of the heat seemed to leak out of Ritchie’s body, like someone had poured cold water down his back.

Before he even had time to think, his son had grown too big for his arms, sitting on the floor across from Ritchie as he laughed with his sister in-law.

And even though he was never supposed to see the side of his father that Ritchie was ashamed to admit had been him, he had seen it clear as day.

And sitting there, staring at the baby girl in his arms, it hit him.

Whatever he touched that was gold—his newborn son, his future, his granddaughter—would turn to paper before his very eyes.

The expectation he had, in those more foolishly optimistic years of his, was that Dhani would grow up and know trust, that Ritchie would grow to remember his own life, and for that matter,  _ be remembered _ .

And the expectation he had, up until that very day, was that Tatia would grow up knowing him through the one photograph they would have together.

Zak had already snapped it, he thought.

And she was soft, and he was smiling.

And she looked sleepy, and he looked happy.

And she had her whole life set out before her, a tiny jewel on a sprawling silk rug, just waiting to take in everything it had to offer.

But the rug had been pulled out from under Ritchie.

There was no baby to wait for anymore. She was well out of her mother’s womb and in her grandfather’s arms, his skin cold to the touch as he handed her back to her father.

As he made his way to the car, and subsequently, as the family drove home, he grew very quiet.

It had finally hit him.

And while it was the thing he had looked forward to across the past nine months, his sort of light at the end of the tunnel, he found that as he drew nearer and nearer to it, it was no soft light at all.

It was harsh, hotter than the surface of the sun, and with ten times the power to blind him.

It enveloped his mind like a sponge filling with acid, its pores eroding as it did precisely what it was meant to do.

With Tatia out in the world, there was no longer anything stopping him from grabbing hold of his shovel and striking himself across the head. 

There was nothing left he had to live for.

The man was intent to watch as his family filed out of the car, talking in some language he couldn’t understand about Zak and Sarah and their baby.

And at first, his eyes fell to George.

He was the one who had stuck beside him through thick and thin for over twenty years, who had sat with him in every place from Liverpool to Los Angeles. 

They used to stay up and talk for hours about God and love and the universe—or even just John’s latest antics if they really ran out of things to say. 

But there used to be something between them; something more than setting the bin out for Ritchie in the morning.

His limbs slow and heavy as he stepped out of the car, his eyes landed on Jason.

At some point—and for heaven’s sake, it felt like thousands of years ago—he used to spend his days exploring the house with his stuffed tiger.

He used to smile while Ritchie yelled at him, his mouth, much to his father’s horror, being absolutely packed with dirt and bugs and the ends of worms.

But now there was no smiling; there was no laughing, and for that matter, there wasn’t any dirt.

Now there was cussing and shouting and the slamming of doors, their corners ripping so hard into their frames it was a miracle they didn’t split in two.

Ritchie felt sick as he trudged into the house, his eyes making their way to Lee.

He had fought tooth, nail, and every other extremity to just help her out a little bit.

Even when she scratched up her brother so bad he would carry the scar for years, even when she had kicked holes in her walls, and even when she slept with knives under her pillow, he had wanted nothing more than to keep her safe.

He wanted, more than anything, to show her that there were better people in the world than the ones she knew about, and that the vast majority of people on the planet were good, kind-hearted, trustworthy individuals.

Though he often forgot it, and by the standard then, it didn’t seem possible, it was  _ him  _ who had convinced  _ George  _ that they should consider fostering children—not the other way around.   
His sunken eyes looked to Dhani, helpless, as though the boy would somehow wake him up from the nightmare he was slipping into.

He was the one that was supposed to have it good.

Even if no one else did, even if all of his siblings spent the first years of their life with people that didn’t want them, didn’t like them, and didn’t have enough sense not to do such awful things to them, Dhani would make it out a normal, well-adjusted kid.

He was supposed to be the one that trusted both of his fathers easily, the one that George and Ritchie would never whisper about as they shook their heads.

And by God, he had ended up in just the same rut as everyone else—unnoticed, untrusting, and without any idea of all the flaming hurdles his father had jumped through just to hold him in his arms.

Standing in the dim light of the kitchen, watching as his family scattered out away from him, Ritchie’s eyes could wander to no one but his own reflection, dark and obscured in the window above the sink. 

Taking a slow, staggered step towards the man, he noticed for the very first time the way his nose and cheeks flushed, the way his furrowed brow dug into his forehead, and the way his lips just barely parted when he felt lost.

The man he was looking at was not himself. 

It couldn’t have been, he thought, that the man in the mirror was the same one that had worked day, night, and afternoon to leave his dead-end job at the post and open a shop of his own.

It couldn’t have been that the man in the mirror was the same one who had stood to watch the sun set in Rishikesh with his husband, who had laid in bed with him until two talking about everything under, over, and around the sun.

It couldn’t have been that the man in the mirror was the same one that had woken up too early on a night flight to California, and as he watched the sun whisper through his window, thought to himself that he had life all figured out, that the puzzle pieces were finally coming together in front of him.

His face fell.

It couldn’t have been, and yet it was.

It made him wonder, somewhere underneath all the mess he was beginning to call his mind, what had changed.

What could have happened that would have triggered such a dramatic change in the course of his life? What had led him from feeling that his life had finally taken a shape, that he was finally a person with a name and a voice, to feeling so hopelessly lost?   
These questions, muttered like forgotten words from the mouth of a sightless sage, were overshadowed by what Ritchie understood to be their mother.

As irony, or luck, or whatever it was would have it, however, their mother was the same type of mother as Zak’s.

Overpowering, she was, an unhinged sort of thing with a penchant for the present and a disdain for the past.

She was violent, and dull, and all of those other things that had led Miss Parish to wherever she had ended up.

This last thought (or perhaps the—first—this woman, as it’s been analogized, was as follows:

What was there left to stay for when he was only causing pain to those around him?

He had had his fun, he decided.

He had held the baby and run the race, snapped the picture and went on his way. 

But that was the problem— _ there was no way for him to go _ .

For those longest nine months of his life, he had been absolutely certain that the only place he would go from the crossroads he had come to was straight down to Hell, that within the span of the tenth month, he would have blown his brains out or something.

But as he finally came to that crossroads, to the light at the end of his tunnel, to the point in his hole where he had to stop digging and wonder whether he should continue, he found himself a much weaker man than he had thought.

His mind swelled inside of his skull, like steel wool was blossoming just behind his eyebrows, reaching its long, cold fingers just down to the nape of his neck—and not nearly in the same way George’s did.

He wanted to think of holding Tatia in his arms, her tiny body pressed warmly against his own as he cooed and smiled at the girl wrapped in the cotton cocoon. 

He wanted to think of the soft touch of his husband’s fingers against his back, that touch he hadn’t felt in God-knows-how-many months.

And more than anything, he wanted to think of his mother, of the way she used to hold him when he was a young boy in pain, whether that be from whatever recent surgery he had had or whatever question he had asked about his father. 

But what he wanted much more—by a  _ very  _ wide margin—was to grab the knife standing in its place on the kitchen counter and jam it into his chest.

For all he cared, the blade was already in there, ripping him apart from the inside out, cutting through flesh and nerves and muscle and sinew as though they were nothing more than butter in a dish.

And once it had carved his torso out like a wooden bowl, the knife turned to needles, long as telephone poles and sharp as a hatchet, making quick work, like a seamstress in a sweatshop, to stitch poisoned thread up through his collarbone and along his neck and around his jaw and across the bridge of his nose, stopping only when it had reached the bare spot in between his eyebrows, and then, like his mother’s hand pulling back to grab him from the street, diving quick towards the front of his brain.

He swallowed and took a step towards the knife, his chest heaving and his eyes sunken so low he swore he could see demons.

But looking at it, he remembered what would have to be done to take away his pain—that knife would actually have to cut into his flesh, and of all people, he had to be the one to get it there.

Shaking, his face white as a sheet, he took heavy steps on iron feet towards the fridge.

Because spilling beer was, while worlds more cowardly, a much less painful alternative to spilling blood. 


	6. Almost Unthinkable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some homophobia, if that bothers you ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

“Afternoon,” Ritchie sighed after about seven rings.

He could almost hear the relief in his mother’s smile as she greeted, “There you are, love. Have you lost your phone again?”

The man let his eyes wander into the expanse of nothingness on the ceiling above him, his hands, toes, and nose colder than the edge of the universe as he did so.

“No,” he admitted. “It was on the wardrobe. I guess I just didn’t feel like pickin’ up.”

“You’re not feeling too well?” Elsie asked, concerned. “What, have you got a fever, or—”

“Oh, no, ‘s not that serious. I’m just tired, really.”

Ritchie should have known this information would worry his mother sick, and so he let out a frustrated sigh as the woman began her barrage of questions:

“Have you been sleeping alright?”

“I’m in bed right now, Elsie.”

But he never seemed to be rested.

“And you’ve been eating enough?”

“Enough that I don’t feel hungry.”

But he was growing thinner by the day.

“Are you stressed?”

“I suppose so.”

But hearing this, his mother perked up.

“What about?” she asked. “Has something happened?”

The man groaned.

“Everything. I’m stressed about everything, and everything’s happened.”

Elsie paused.

“Has George been giving you a lot of grief?”

If Ritchie was in a better state than he was in, he would have laughed.

But all he could bring himself to mumble was, “You’d think I ran over a baby cow in front of him.”

And as soon as the words left his mouth, he cringed.

It was a fool’s errand to go off and start rambling to Elsie about the man.

Not to imply that they were enemies—for that matter, it wasn’t even that they disliked each other.

But their relationship had, to put it lightly, not started off on the right foot.

Really, that was Ritchie’s fault.

Only two months after coming out to his parents, making his mother cry like he had never seen her cry before, and going through an exorcism at her behest, he had somehow thought it would be a good idea to introduce his very young, proud, and opinionated boyfriend to his very quaint, very faithful, very traditional mother.

He should have expected that the two would start to fight—hell, with George speaking for him every time Elsie made some sort of unknowingly inappropriate remark, he didn’t blame his mother for thinking the man was a bad influence.

And as much as Ritchie wanted to think that all of those arguments between them were in the past, that George had meant it when he had apologized for talking over him, and that with the advent of her grandchildren, Elsie had mellowed out, he couldn’t exactly pretend that the two got along like bread and butter.

Elsie saw George, at least to her son’s knowledge, as a lost sort of man who worshipped a new god every day, and who was overly proud of himself for what she (more or less) still believed was an inferior way to live one’s life.

Overly may have been the wrong word to use, sure. But George had always been more proud of being gay than Ritchie ever was—and neither of them could really explain why.

Where Ritchie, in those long gone and better forgotten days of the 1990s, would daydream every once in a while about finally getting his life together and marrying some woman, pretending with some sincerity that he truly did love her as they grew themselves a family, George would dispel the notion entirely, actively trying to convince his boyfriend—though now, Ritchie saw it more as whacking some sense into him—that if he faked his whole life, it would undoubtedly come crashing down around him.

But the problem with Elsie was that she saw anything George did—from reminding Ritchie that he had no need to live a lie for someone else’s comfort, to holding the hand of the man he’d been in love with for nearly  _ thirty years _ , to referring to him as his husband—as too much for her.

And the problem with George was that he didn’t understand that Elsie needed time to grasp that the life she had envisioned for her son (the one with a wife and a house and two point five kids) was never going to happen.

She would watch the realization sink into her husband’s mind, and would do nothing but observe as her son’s friends slowly came around to the thought that he slept in the same bed as a man every night, but as the whole world seemed to spin around her, she would tilt by only the slightest angle.

And George certainly wasn’t making anything any easier for her.

He saw her as a very stubborn old woman, the sort of person who pushed her beliefs onto others at every opportunity and scoffed at the notion of anyone existing in a different way than herself.

And again, there was a very  _ slight  _ bit of truth to this, because Elsie  _ did  _ take a very long time to absorb ideas that weren’t her own—especially when they involved implications of the moral and otherworldly kind.

She needed a large, open space to think, its walls decorated with clocks and not timers.   
And it was fair to say that most people did.

Even George’s parents, when he had told them, had taken some time to come around. His father, particularly, had reasoned for upwards of a year—somehow—that his son had no romantic and sexual inclination for men, but was just very shy, and unwilling to accept this truth in order to save his own reputation.

But he had come around much quicker than Elsie—for heaven’s sake, where she still struggled to watch her son show affection to his husband, the Harrisons were already dead and in their graves with no complaints.

And, believe it or not, you can’t convince someone to change their minds by coming off as overly defensive or hostile—a lesson that took George quite some time and multiple arguments with his boyfriend to figure out.

So for all Ritchie cared, by venting about his husband to a woman who still searched, somewhere in the back of her mind, for a reason to bring the man down, he had just shot himself in the foot.

“Has he been treating you alright?” Elsie asked, her pitch raising.

Ritchie pressed his thumb and forefinger between his eyebrows, his head pounding in his skull.

“He’s been treating me fine,” he grunted, though in his head, he was fighting a battle.

Either he told his mother about his problems and risked tarnishing her already fragile relationship with her son-in-law, or he shut his mouth and let himself wallow in his own pity some more. 

The latter was tempting, but with a head full of wasps and skin growing hotter than Hell itself, Ritchie impulsively fired the shot straight between his mother and husband.

“He’s just been actin’ like he’s king of the world, you know? He thinks he’s so much better than everyone else....”

Elsie paused before asking, “What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know!” the man cried. “He just—it’s like he hates my guts, honest! He’s always right, and I’m always wrong, and he can’t go a single second without criticizing me! It’s like his new favorite hobby!”

“Maybe you should talk to him about that.”

“And let him yell at me some more?” Ritchie shook his head. “I’m not doing that.”

His mother was silent for a very long time before continuing, “Well… is there a reason he’s upset with you?”

His head falling back against his pillow, smacking into it hard enough he grew dizzy, Ritchie let out a long sigh.

He had told Elsie and Harry seven years ago that he had been abusing alcohol and was working to get sober, and by God, they were  _ wonderful  _ about it. 

They were the ones that supported him when no one else had the time, calling him every day to check in and ask how he was doing.

In all honesty, they were the ones that pulled him through his withdrawals and the emotional turmoil of that year, from Zak’s outbursts to the death of George’s father to the stress that came with expecting a child.

But four years after taking that ill-fated sip of beer, kicking his dependence on alcohol back into full gear, he still hadn’t told them that he had slipped.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to; he thought about it often—just sitting down, making some tea, and telling them that he wasn’t as well as he made himself out to be.

But for Ritchie, it was a matter of pride and shame.

And he would rather be caught dead and naked in the River Mersey than admit to his parents that he had failed them any more than he already had.

So, at Elsie’s question, he could only answer, “You know, I work all day, and I make him the money to go out and buy bread, and when I wanna come home and sit down, it’s a problem to him.”

With a sigh, he continued, “He thinks I’m a lazy fuck, real—”

“Richard, you know how I feel about that kind of language.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sorry. I just—I get tangled up in it, you know? My only point is that he thinks I’m just sittin’ around bein’ lazy, and he’s not too happy with that.”

“So you two have been fighting because of that?”

“More or less.”

“And have you tried making up with him?”

Ritchie tossed his hand in the air.

“I’m not the one that needs to make up with him,” he snapped. “He’s got to figure his own shit out.”

“Richard.”

“Listen, I’m sorry, but that’s how it is!”

“I understand that,” Elsie warned. “But I only mean to say that I think the two of you need to sit down and talk about why he feels like that.”

“I already know why,” her son grumbled. “It’s because he’s bein’ a jacka—”

“Richard Starkey!” Elsie finally scolded. “Come on, there isn’t any place for that kind of language—not if it’s me you want to speak to.”

Ritchie muttered an unconvincing apology, and with a sigh, his mother moved on.

“How are the kids?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Not at all?”

“God—well, of you really want to hear about it, Jason’s been absolutely horrible.”

Elsie’s cocked eyebrow was nearly audible.

“Has he?” she asked in a low voice.

“You’d think he was five years old. He keeps raggin’ on me and George about how he’s never hungry at supper—I swear that boy’s gonna look like a twig by the end of the year.

“And he gets real odd sometimes, I tell you what. He’ll talk for a real long time about the scratch on the table or… or just anything, really. Now I’ve always known he was an extravert, but I’m tellin’ you, Elsie, this is just ridiculous! It’s like he forgot how to shut his mouth.”

“Oh, well, you’ve got to get him to eat,” the woman said, not a surprising phrase coming from her. “Get some meat on those bones. Now, has he given you a reason why he’s not eating, or is it just th—”

“No,” Ritchie interrupted. “No—every night, he just says he’s not hungry. So me and George fight him for a little bit, and eventually he’ll just get mad and take a little tiny bite to try and win us over.”

He sighed.

“If he even shows up, that is. Says he’s too busy doin’ other things—but he don’t even got a job or nothin’, so Lord knows what he’s on about.”

“Maybe he could work at the shop?” Elsie offered.

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. I keep tellin’ him to think about it. But I guess he doesn’t want to listen.”

He let out a pathetic laugh.

“What else is new, though? Hell, I even told him his friend would be there—’cos he would be, you know; it would be him and John’s son—”

“John with the little Chinese wife?”

“She’s Japanese,” Ritchie corrected. “But yeah, that’s him. They would work together—Jason and his son from the other marriage. Maybe they had a falling out, though. Beats me.”

“Maybe,” Elsie sighed, shuffling about in wherever she was (likely on her sofa with the lamp on beside her.) “But how about the others? Are they all doing alright?”

“Oh, I don’t ever see Lee and Dhani anymore.”

His mother laughed.

“They’re at that age, are they?”

“It’s not that,” Ritchie said flatly. “They just hate me.”

And hearing this, Elsie’s tone changed from one of coy camaraderie to deliberate denial.

“Come on now; I’m sure that’s not true.”

“Believe me, it is.”

“But how on Earth would you know that? For heaven’s sake, Ritchie, how old is Dhani now?”

The man couldn’t give her an answer.

He didn’t know.

After a pause, expecting him to say something, Elsie continued, “I promise you, he doesn’t hate you. I don’t think that boy could hate anyone if they smacked him clear across the face.”

“You don’t get it,” Ritchie said, shaking his head.

“What do I not get, exactly?”

His cheeks growing hot with frustration, the feeling weighing on his heart like a bowling ball on a plastic cup, he cried, “God, he’s lookin’ at me like I’m the black freakin’ plague—him and George both.

“And there’s the other thing about George,” he went on with a scoff. “Accordin’ to him, I got mad a while ago and tossed out somethin’ of Dhani’s, and now its his sworn duty to never let me live it down! I’m telling you, I hear it every day—he thinks the lad’s about to go mad or something, just ‘cos I tossed out his drawing.”

“Well—why’s he think that?” Elsie asked after a brief pause.

“Because Dhani won’t even look at me with both his eyes! My God, you’d think I held a gun to his head…”

He laughed, the air leaving his throat in coarse, insincere gasps.

“And you know what? With George makin’ it out to be that way, it’s no wonder!”

His mother opened her mouth to speak, but she was quickly overtaken by her son, who, in such a wretched state of mind, still left a stranger in the fog with a gradually lowering amount of good reasons to live, found it near impossible to shut his mouth.

“I don’t even know why I try,” he admitted. “Honestly, Els, at this point, I’m just waitin’ on the divorce papers.”

“Don’t say that!” Elsie gasped. 

“And why shouldn’t I? No use coverin’ my eyes and pretending I can’t see the inevitable.”   


There was a pregnant pause.

And then, her voice bleeding with sympathy, the woman asked, “Is that really how you feel? That he’s going to divorce you?”

“I don’t think there’s any other way to feel.”

“Then can I ask you something?”

Ritchie could almost picture her hand on her hip as he sighed, “Sure.”

Taking a slow, deep breath then, Elsie asked, in the gentle way only a mother could manage, “Have—have you ever considered finding someone to talk to about all this?”

Her son’s voice went dead as a doorknob.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You know…” she stalled. “Someone like… a counselor.”

She didn’t even have the time to explain herself before Ritchie raged, “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Listen, I just think it could be really good for you if you j—”

“Stop. For God’s sake, Elsie, just stop.”

He shook his head, a painfully noticeable crack in his voice as he cried, “I thought you were over this by now!”

“Over what?”

“Telling me to get my head checked, damnit! How—  _ how  _ in  _ Hell  _ are you still on about that after twenty years?!”

“Richard,” Elsie scolded, drawing a sharp breath in through her nose. “Will you show a little respect? All I’m trying to say is that it might be good for the two of you to speak to someone! If you keep saying that he’s criticizing you, and turning the kids against you, and you feel like things ar—”

“We have kids, for heaven’s sake! I’m not gonna go walk up to someone and say— _ Hey! Would you mind doin’ me a favor and findin’ some way to get me into birds? _ ”

“That isn’t at all what I’m telling you to do.”

__ “ _ I think it’d be a real nice change to just walk out on my husband and the four kids I’ve raised, don’t you _ ?”

Her tone lilting in that sort of sing-song way it only did when she was growing frustrated, the woman muttered, “You’re not listening to me, love…”

“Then why don’t you say something?” he hissed.

Audibly trying to control her emotions, Elsie said, “I will—I’m going to say that I’m not telling you to try and change your… _ lifestyle _ … because you’re right in saying that should all be in the past by now.

“But what I  _ am  _ telling you is that I think you and George need to sit down and talk things out with a counselor. Because  _ you  _ said, in your own words, that you’ve got four kids to look after, and I don’t think either of us want to put them through a divorce. And if unless I’m mistaken—and I don’t think I am—then I don’t think you want to go through that either.”

If Ritchie had less close of a relationship with his mother, then he well may have brought up her hypocrisy in saying that she didn’t want to drag anyone through the mud that was marital separation.

But being the man he was, he could only let his cheeks flush.

“I don’t know why George is being so aggressive with you,” Elsie continued. “And quite frankly, I think that’s his own issue. I think both of you have a fair share of those, really, and for heaven’s sake, I think you need to work those out!”

Her voice lowering, she said, “You’re not doing well, love. Goodness, this is the first time all week you’ve actually picked up the phone! It’s— it’s been like this for months, love! If you didn’t answer me this time, then I was going to go send Harry to make sure you were okay! And I don’t know who you think you’re fooling saying you’re alright, but you can’t fool your mum.

“So I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to—but at the very least, I want you to think about it—getting counseling, that is. Not just for your marriage, but for yourself, too.”

“God,” Ritchie moaned, raising his voice. “I don’t know why I tell you these sorts of things.”

“Because I’m your mother!” Elsie cried. “And for Pete’s sake, I’m always going to be!”

“Listen—’cos I’m only gonna say this one time—”

“Richard Starkey, you have no right to speak to me in that tone!”

“ _ I don’t need your damn counseling _ ,” The man said, now full-on shouting. “I never have, and I never will. So if you could just sit down for the first time in your life and get that through your head, I would appreciate that.”

“I’m not t—”

He pretended to ignore the tearful desperation in his mother’s voice as he hung up the phone.

And while he was certainly very angry at her (and for some reason, at everyone else on the entire planet, potentially sparing Tatia, though the thought of her still brought to mind those darkest ideas of his) what he felt more heavily on his soul was regret.

Elsie was a very emotional sort of woman—even to her own detriment—and he knew that. She would cry if he so much as forgot to give her a hug on his way out the door.

So to think that he had actually told her off, bearing this in mind… it was almost unthinkable. 

But there’s quite a difference between what is  _ almost  _ unthinkable, and what is  _ completely  _ unthinkable.

And looking at the state of things—how he had, within the span of the past few years, somehow managed to tick off every person he’d met in his entire life—he thought to himself: what was one more person crying because of him?

He felt compelled to pick up the phone again and apologize to his mother.

But that could wait for another time.

Like it was controlled by a string from somewhere up above him, his hand moved instead towards the glass of wine on the nightstand.


	7. The Biscuit Cake Battleground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably my favorite to have written so far... enjoy!

By all measures, the night started out the same way any Friday night started.

The adults were picking at their food and contemplating seconds as they made light banter, talking about whatever came to mind apart from the three topics never to be discussed—politics (much to John and Yoko’s disappointment) religion (to George’s) and Princess Diana (to the entire United Kingdom’s.)

And their older children—Stella, Mary, Lee, and Jason—were busy on their phones in the living room nearby, looking up every once in a while to show something to one of the others, or otherwise rant about the oh-so-important intricacies of their dramatic teenage lives.

Meanwhile, their younger brothers (and Sean) had wasted no time in scarfing down their dinner to go and spill James’s legos all over his bedroom floor.

Which, of course, their older siblings found absolutely riveting, as every so often, they could be heard saying things through the vents such as:

“Sorry I am for being late, Master Obi Wan! An accident on the roundabout there was!”

So, put plainly—there was plenty of food to eat, drinks to drink, and moderate enjoyment to be had as cats and dogs lay underneath the table, waiting for their share of the goodies.

It was a spectacularly average Friday night at the McCartneys’, really. 

For the first two or three hours.

After that—it was debatable.

But there’s no use debating anything if you don’t know what you’re talking about. And as such, we’ll start at the beginning, right in between those second and third hours, at the far end of the mahogany dining table—right where Ritchie was sitting.

There was a glass of wine in front of him—his fourth one that night, though he hoped no one was keeping count—and a more relaxed than usual George by his side, his brow furrowed as he listened to Linda’s fascinating tales of how Heather was adjusting to life back in the States, and the corners of his mouth ticking up as he heard John joke that it was only right that him and the young woman switched places, and that the only thing left to do was for Paul and Linda to let him hang around all day and eat all their food. 

“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?” George asked, cocking an eyebrow.

John pointed at him as he said, “This is true—but as of right now, I haven’t snuck milk into his tea.”

“Or have you?” Paul asked, suspicious.

This earned a hearty laugh from everyone at the table, Ritchie included.

“That is between me and my lawyer,” John said, grinning as he pat his wife on the back.

Yoko vaguely acknowledged this with a nod.

“You’re gonna need a lawyer if you keep breakin’ in like this.”

“Breaking in is quite the term—I prefer unexpectedly arriving.”

George sighed as he jeered, “Like how you keep unexpectedly arriving in my garden?”

Yoko’s eyes squinted, her hair falling around her chin as she turned to her husband.

“What are you doing there?”

“Oh!” George announced, raising his hands in the air. “Let me tell you!”

And as Ritchie sat back in his chair, nodding at the thought that the man’s actions were finally coming to light, John murmured a quiet, “Oh dear…”

“This man,” George began. “This absolute bastard—every so often, I’ll be out watering my flowers, got the can in me hand and all, and I’ll look up and have the Dickens scared right out of me, because you know what I see?”

Yoko made unimpressed eye contact with her snickering husband.

“I see this lad out in his sunglasses at six o’clock in the evening, standin’ there like he’s starin’ at the sun, he’s got his mouth wide open—”

“Not true,” John interrupted. “It’s only slightly open.”

“And he finally looks at me, and he goes,”

Here George paused to recreate the face of a man brave enough to trespass in the sacred patch of home-grown carrots he had worked for years to cultivate. 

And in an unmistakably nasally voice, the corners of his cheeks scrunched up so that his eyes squinted, he said, “Hey George!”   
John burst out laughing.

“I’m mad at my wife, want to drive me around the place?”

And changing his tone and face back to its usual state, the man went on, “And of course, I’m in utter shock—for heaven’s sake, he interrupted my gardening! But that doesn’t stop him any, and he keeps going:

“Come on, Haz, you’ve got a car, don’t you? The one on the street there? Let’s go, man! You know I can’t do it myself!”

“What do you expect me to do?” John cried. “If I start drivin’, I’m gonna be dead in a half an hour!”

“Well, I get in my car— _ naturally _ —because I don’t have any say in the matter, and I start driving around, not saying a word, ‘cos I’m still thinking about my plants and how I’ve abandoned my family to take this gobshite to Devonshire gardens, and all I hear is:

“Ah! My cat shit on the floor!”

John put his head in his hands, his cheeks red in a mix of humility and humor.

“Ah! I’m mad at my wife!

“Ah! My wife’s mad at me!

And topping off the whole thing, stammering through his own laughter, George increased the fear in his voice, saying, “Ah! Cynthia saw me knock over a bag of muesli in Asda at six o’clock last Tuesday and we made eye contact while  _ Everybody Hurts  _ was playin’ on the radio! Why did I ever agree to move back to this hellhole?”

Yoko only shook her head.

And Ritchie only snickered as he watched the wine in his glass slosh around.

But John looked like he was about to pass out laughing, his hand over his mouth as he whispered, “Too real…”

“And then finally,” George concluded, regaining his composure. “ _ Finally _ —he looks at me like I’ve just told him where he can find God, and still with his sunglasses on, he nods and he goes:

“Thanks, Haz.

“And then he doesn’t speak to me for a week, until he inevitably comes back to do it again.”

“So that’s where you’ve been?” Yoko asked quietly.

John shrugged. “More or less.”

“Oh, but that’s the thing,” Paul added. “He does it, and at some point, you’ve just got to go with it.”

He laughed.

“Doesn’t mean that we can’t call you out on it, though.”

“Listen,” John said after taking a comically large sip of his wine. “Sometimes, you’ve got to get in a car and drive, you dig? But sometimes, life knocks you on your ass, and sometimes, for some people, driving a car would kill them instantaneously on account of their god-awful vision—and I am one of those people.”

After a short pause, as though it had just occurred to her, Yoko turned to him then and asked, “You’re mad at me?”

“Not mad, my dear. Just aggrieved.”

She shook her head.

And though they tried their best to hide it, it was clear to everyone at the table that there was some tension between their favorite bozos. 

Fortunately (or unfortunately, if you were Yoko) John’s habit of showing up in his friends’ gardens and asking to be driven places while he ranted about his peculiar family life meant that there was no question about the source of that tension. 

All it boiled down to in the end was that after storming out of the country on a whim and vowing never to return—he had returned.

It wasn’t his intention, of course. 

In fact, it was far from it.

But life had a funny way of working itself out, and for John, that meant that while he was walking home with his wife one night, he was shot by some nutcase who didn’t like his thoughts about God. 

This—understandably—was not something those seated at the table spoke about often. Conversations of such a nature were delegated specifically to the past, or otherwise uninitiated unless John himself brought it up—and even then, only to Paul.

But it was almost an understatement to say that it had had a very real effect on him and his family. 

And as he had explained—in the span of about three seconds over the phone one day, considering it was not at all his favorite topic of conversation—living in New York, in a city of eight million strangers whose intentions were completely unknown, had begun to deeply unsettle his wife.

Yoko had not taken the incident very lightly (if a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress was anything to go by) and so, after so much time, she felt it unsafe, unsustainable, and almost unbearable to keep herself boxed up a hundred feet above the ground that was, in her mind, still stained with blood.

Hence, John and Yoko sat at Paul’s dining table on Friday nights, just the same as everyone else.

In a subtle effort to relieve the creeping tension in the room—or at the very least his own internal tension—Ritchie took the liberty to pour himself what was left of the wine in the bottle, his face more or less blank as he sighed.

And to his surprise, with a cautious grin, the host then asked, “Are you sure you want some more?”   
Ritchie was so stunned he nearly dropped the bottle on the table.

It wasn’t that he was ashamed that one of his friends had noticed his less-than-savory drinking habits—though that was certainly part of it, and no small part, at that.

But it was more so a state of shock he was in, not shame.

See, the last time Paul (or anyone, for that matter) had commented on his incredible and unadmirable consumption of alcohol had been before Dhani was even born.

Paul would joke about it every now and then, often suggesting that him and Linda get the man his own bottle of wine for supper—but those sorts of jokes stopped  _ very  _ quickly after he had mentioned to them one night that he was trying to get sober; that his “problematic drinking” (read: alcoholism) was having severe effects on the quality of his domestic life, and as such, the completion of his future goals.

And even on that first night he had reached for the wine, sick and tired of pretending to be the man he once was, no one—apart from George, though he would never be so bold as to call it out in public—had bat an eye.

Maybe they thought that he had everything under control.

And maybe he thought he did, too.

“What?” he asked, equal parts confused and deadpan.

But by the tone of Paul’s voice, and especially by the contents of his next statement, that belief was less sturdy than it was presumed to be.

“Well,” he said with a bit of a sigh, standing up to collect his guests’ plates and silverware. “It just seems like you’ve had quite a bit… I’d hate to make George drive you home.”

“We walked.”

“Then I’d hate to make him walk you home,” Paul responded seamlessly. 

And hearing this, Ritchie’s eyes squinted. 

“You don’t make any sense…”

“I make cents enough to pay my bills, love.”

His neck snapping around at one hundred eighty degrees exactly, spinning so fast Ritchie was almost certain it would break, John protested, “Get your own line, you git!”

The host chuckled.

But while everyone else seemed to move on with things, Paul coming back to collect more plates, and Linda helping him this time, both George and Ritchie seemed to be hung up like laundry on the man’s suggestion.

George preferred to take a more passive route in expressing his concern, his emotions delegated solely to his wringing hands beneath the table.

But his husband, as he always seemed to do, turned the sharp corner into a rather aggressive form of emotional articulation, continuing, “You mean to tell me you’re gonna drink the rest?”

“Another day, maybe,” Paul said, bobbing his head back and forth. “Makes it easier to get through grading, you know.”

“There’s only enough for one glass.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ll have to hope that most kids know how to spell ‘fountain.’ And besides, Linda’s made a biscuit cake—you got to have room for that.”

“Oh God,” John laughed. “You guys are gonna have to roll me outta here.”

Ritchie only shook his head.

“Paul, I’m not drunk.”

George dug his thumb into his palm.

“Never said you were,” the host sighed, lifting his hands in the air. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to have much more, that’s all. You sound a little tipsy.”

“Are you kiddin’ me?” Ritchie asked, raising his voice just enough to make his husband uncomfortable. “It’s a Friday night, for heaven’s sake!”

“But tomorrow’s a Saturday night,” John raised, Yoko’s head on his shoulder as he shrugged. “Just think of that, huh?”

It was a stupid point to make, sure, but there was only one goal at that table—to keep Ritchie from that extra glass of wine—and any and all ways of completing that goal were, for that time, valid.

“Paul, it’s literally just a glass.”

“And this is literally a biscuit cake, so do you want a slice or not?”

“What?” the man cried. “You’re makin’ me choose now?”

It was at this point George finally broke his silence, a sour, sapped-out look on his face as he sighed, “Ritchie…”

“What in God’s name is so wrong with me wanting a glass of wine?”

“There isn’t anything wrong with it,” his husband assured him. “But you’ve had plenty, and you don’t need anymore, and you’ll be just fine without it.”

“I know that!” Ritchie protested—and in his heart he really did believe it. “Believe me, I understand. I just don’t get why you’re all bein’ so weird about it!”

“Then we don’t have to be,” John said, a wonder in his voice like he had just discovered sliced bread. “Everyone… just stop bein’ weird and eat your cake.”

And so they did, their eyes shifting nervously like pendulums in clocks, their forks cutting slowly into the vegan biscuit cake as their minds ran through possible conversation topics.

Until Ritchie set his fork down and grabbed the bottle of wine, that is.

“Ritchie,” George moaned. 

A newfound anger in his voice, his cheeks flushed to the color of the strawberries that decorated the top of the cake, Ritchie responded, “I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna sit here, as a fully grown man, and let the lot of you tell me what to do!”

John’s eyebrows raised on his ever-growing forehead. 

“It’s really not gonna kill you not to drink it,” he said, his patience waning. “Maybe it feels like it will, but—”

“I know that! For God’s sake, why do you think I don’t?”

No one could find a proper way to respond to this. 

And so, his heart shriveling in his chest, having been properly heated and dried by his frustration, Ritchie stood up, and if only for show, downed the entire glass of wine in the span of about ten seconds.

As he lowered his head, his mouth ringing with the taste of the grapes, his eyes found a pathetic sort of scene.

Yoko seemed to be pretending she didn’t see anything, her hands resting on the table as she suddenly grew very interested in the top of her cake.

Linda sat with her arms crossed and her lips pursed.

George held onto his hands so tight he was beginning to lose feeling in them, his face still as a statue’s as he stared blankly into his lap.

John looked like he wanted to blow his brains out, his eyes about the same size as avocado pits and his eyebrows raised high enough to get in God’s way.

And Paul simply tilted his head, making very disappointed and increasingly annoyed eye contact with Ritchie.

“Is that good for ye?” Ritchie asked, indignant. “Yeah? Was that what you wanted?”

“As a matter of fact,” the host sighed. “It wasn’t.”

“Well, that’s what you get.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know how old you think I am, Paul, and I don’t know who you think you are, runnin’ around the place, tryin’ to—”

“Tryin’ to what?” George snapped, his hands bolting free from each other. “To keep you off your arse for a couple hours? To actually have a  _ good  _ night, without you pissed out of your mind?”

Before Paul had the chance to try and defuse the situation, it escalated.

Ritchie’s chest still stinging from the perceived insult, annoyed by having the dirt he dug tossed back down to him, he snarled, “You put ‘em up to this, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t put  _ anyone  _ up to  _ anything _ .”

“Oh, yes you did!” the man hissed. “For fuck’s sake, George, it’s like havin’ a bunch more of you runnin’ around!”

“And maybe that’d be good for you.”

“And,” John muttered, opening every cabinet in the house to find some tinfoil to wrap his cake with, “We’re leaving…”

Yoko wasted no time joining him in his search.

“What are you sayin’?” Ritchie screeched, more scared than angry.

“For heaven’s sake,” George cried. “You’re acting like a child! And you know what? You always do! I’m sorry, really, but I’m just—I’m sick and tired of it!”

Paul tried fruitlessly to calm the men down, about as effective as the moderator in an American political debate, as his wife led John and Yoko to the cupboard beneath the sink.

“I act like a child? Guess that explains why you treat me like one, then, huh?”

“I do  _ not  _ treat you like a child.”

“Can ye look me in the eyes and say that? Really?”

“Hey Sean!” John yelled, both to get the boy to hear him and to release some of the pressure from that hydraulic press that was Paul’s kitchen. “It looks like we’re gonna be leavin’ now! Get your shoes on, please!”

“You know what? I treat you the way you ask to be treated, Ritchie, and I tell you what, if you want to show up to dinner at four in the morning with a DUI—”

“That was one time!” the man shouted.

And hearing this, wrapping her coat around herself, Yoko added a swift, “And fast!”

“It’s not  _ one time  _ when it’s every night,” George choked, suffocated by both emotion and his need to completely suppress it in front of his friends. 

“You want me to come home, then?”

“Yes! Is— is it so much to ask for you to come home at five? Six, even?! Hell, I don’t care if you’re drunk or sober or strung out, just  _ come home _ .”

“Fine!” Ritchie laughed. “Fine! Look, I’ll do it right now!”

“Come on now,” Paul said abruptly. “Linda’s made us this lovely biscuit cake—”

“Thank you, Linda!” Ritchie shouted, much to the woman’s confusion.

And then, pushing through chairs and doors and a whole room full of second-hand embarrassed teenagers, he made his way into the foyer, where, in his rage, he slammed his shoulders into John’s, and on his way out the door, earned himself a very indignant line of curses loud enough to wake the dead.

And once Ritchie was in his own home, with his own wine to drink, hunched over on the kitchen countertop with a broken cupboard behind him, it finally hit him.

He had just ruined every relationship he had ever had—dividing the four of them in ways unseen since the days when John got so strung out he thought he was God.

He had let everyone see straight through his and George’s facade of being an imperfect, but still functional couple, of being a somewhat capable set of parents.

He had laid his ship bare for all to see.

And what an awful ship it was.

There was no chance, he told himself, that John or Paul—or even Linda or Yoko—would ever want to see him again.

And maybe they never had.

He couldn’t imagine George would ever look at him the same way he did when phonebooks were still useful and women wore their hair so high it could make any stoner blush.

But maybe he had never looked at Ritchie at all—not the  _ real  _ Ritchie, anyways.

Breaking down as he finished what was left his glass, reality hit him:

The list of people that would even bother to attend his funeral was rapidly shrinking, with George, Dhani, Jason, Lee, Paul, Linda, John, and Yoko having all been crossed off. 

That left virtually no one but the body in the casket.


	8. To George and Richard Starkey

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhh so this one is about twice the normal length of one of these chapters (about 6,000) but if it makes you feel any better there was a chapter of my last work that was 9,000 words! Anyways, I'll be passing out snacks in the end notes for when you make it through!

It was a very unusual thing for Ritchie’s presence to be acknowledged as he walked in the door.

The few occasions it did, happen, however, it meant one of only a few things—either something terrible had happened and someone required immediate help, George had discovered something he really wasn’t meant to and was up in arms about it, or there had been some sort of major historical event—some kind of assasination or death.

So as the man turned the doorknob to step into the foyer, hearing his husband call for him as he did so, he felt a pit grow in his stomach.

“What is it?” he asked, haphazardly tossing his coat on the rack beside the door. 

“Get in here,” George called. “We’re watchin’ old movies!”

Ritchie’s brow furrowed at this, but considering he had thought the queen had finally keeled over, he obliged.

Walking slowly into the living room, he found a rather strange sight.

Everyone was sitting on the couch together (or at least near it) for the first time in ages, confused smiles on their faces as they stared into the television screen.

And taking a look at it himself, it wasn’t hard for Ritchie to understand why.

Glowing on the screen, in nothing short of laughable quality, stood a young man on a stage, his eyes shut and his bangs falling into his eyes as he strummed a guitar and sang the best cover he could of James Ray’s “Got My Mind Set on You.”

In the very corner read the date:

_ 07/03/2000 _

“Oh my God,” Ritchie gasped. “Where’d you even find this thing?”

George, seemingly very proud of his younger self’s inability to see, laughed, “I thought I’d go and clean out the attic, you know, and I found a bunch of the old discs, so I thought…”

“How many hours has it been now?” his husband asked, taking a seat. 

George only sighed.

“Too many…”

And as the young man on stage took a bow, cheers erupting from the (likely drunken) men behind the camera before it faded to black, George rushed to pull it out of the disc player.

“You got another one, Dhani?” he asked, handing the boy the ejected one.

Dhani nodded.

“Yeah—this one’s from the nineties.”

George grinned as he loaded it into the disc player. “Then it ought to be good…”

And within a second, as Ritchie plopped himself down on the sofa, stealing what had once been George’s seat, he saw himself reappear on the screen, the whirring of a fan ringing out from behind him as he pointed the camera at a mirror.

He looked so young, then, he thought to himself.

For heaven’s sake, he was still walking around with a white streak in his hair like some seventy year-old man!

His eyes wandered down to the date in the corner, but before they could reach it, the beardless Ritchie made a point to announce, “Today is the tenth of August, in none other than 1996, the year of our Lord…”

The older Ritchie gave a bit of a smirk to his younger self.

“I’ve just bought this wonderful camera here, just makin’ sure it works… and I think it does.”

“God,” Jason said, shaking his head. “You looked stupid.”

“Everyone looked stupid,” George reassured. “It was 1996.”

Taking in a deep breath, Stupid Ritchie continued, “John told us today that his girlfriend’s pregnant. Says he plans on marryin’ her and everything. So now we’ve got that to look forward to.”

With only slight turbulence, the camera panned over to the doorway, revealing a more or less unibrowed man reading on a bed, his back slumped down so far he had to hold the pages over his eyes.

“We’ve got George over there, as you can see.”

He paused.

“Say hi, George.”

And hearing this, the other man looked into the camera (or really, just next to it) with a smirk.

“Don’t point that thing at me,” he warned. 

“What? You scared I’m gonna make you famous?”

George’s grin only widened at this, but feigning annoyance, he murmured, “Sod off, I’m tryin’ to read.”

“Oh yeah?” his then-boyfriend laughed. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

“No!”

As the camera shook towards a man trying his lazy best to escape, George laughed.

“Stop it,” he moaned. “You’re gonna make me lose my place!”

“Oh, look at that…  _ Foundations of the Oriental Beliefs _ … this is the good stuff.”

“Sounds like somethin’ you would read,” Jason snorted.

George shook his head. “Come on, now. Save that for the director’s commentary.”

And though George, his face marked with wrinkles and skin that seemed to sag against his cheeks, was able to retain most, if not all of his composure at the time, his unbelievably young self on the screen was not.

His hands flung at the camera, reaching fruitlessly (and quite lazily) to retrieve his book as he groaned, “Come on, I was just at the good part!”

“And what part’s that?” Ritchie laughed, a certain, long-gone joviality in his voice.

His head resting against the mattress, careful not to mess up his hair, George said, genuinely annoyed, “Islam is spreading to the Indian subcontinent, and for God’s sake—”

“Allah’s sake.”

As soon as the man had said this, George paused.

Every muscle in his face, for a split second, seemed to freeze, his eyebrow(s) knit together in some kind of chemical bond too strong to rip apart.

And then, in slow succession, his mouth spread into a smile, his cheeks lifted towards his eyes, and his teeth brushed his lower lip.

“You git!” he laughed. “You turn that thing off before I knock out yer teeth!”

“I’d like to see you try.”

So try George did, extending his limp arm over where the camera was positioned, and with the determination of a sloth, smacking at the man behind it.

“Is that the best you’ve got?” Ritchie asked, his smile almost audible.

His boyfriend shrugged. 

“Best I’ve got for someone so handsome. Now for Pete’s sake, go find someone else to point that thing at! God, go run to John’s—he’ll have you there all night.”

Ritchie laughed.

“I’m sure he will.”

With that, the screen faded to black, and inside of it, Ritchie was able to see his reflection—his older self, with a beard and graying hair. 

The one that couldn’t remember the last time George had touched his face.

There was a pregnant pause before anyone spoke.

And when they did, it was Dhani.

“Oh my God…” he gasped. “You guys were gross!”

“Who’s to say they aren’t now?” Jason sighed, earning a well-deserved look of disappointment from his Baba.

“For your information,” George said, shaking his head as he pulled the disc out. “I prefer romantic. Now give it to me, Dhani. What’s next?”

The boy wasted no time in handing him the next disc, and as his father loaded it into the player, explained, “Eleventh of June, 2006.”

“The golden years,” Jason reminisced, spreading his limbs out on the sofa in a comically exaggerated manner. “Just me, myself, and I…”

“Shoulda stayed that way,” Lee scoffed.

And as her brother laughed at this, his head rolling back as it always did, the screen in front of them lit up, the sun shining into the camera as it zoomed in on two figures sitting in the sand.

They were on the shore—at Meols, if Ritchie’s memory didn’t fail him—watching the sunset together, a man and a small boy, their hair in their eyes as the wind blew around them.

“Oh God,” Jason groaned. “I look like a freaking cabbage patch kid.”

Both of his fathers hushed him.

And on the screen, the boy turned snarky teenager who never ate dinner waved his hands in the air, his eyes blinking wildly as he raved, “But—but they all got lost, so that was no good.”

“No good at all,” Ritchie sighed, taking in the view as he pat the boy’s head.

Behind the camera, his then-boyfriend snickered.

And hearing this, Ritchie turned to him. 

“Oh,” he announced. “Will you look at that? George has got the camera out…”

“Really?!” Jason gasped.

“Yes really, you little idiot,” the older Jason teased. “You’re on the Truman Show.”

Running up to his then foster-father, the boy giggled, “Did you hear my story?”

“Course I did,” George said matter-of-fact.

Jason blushed, his chin dragging down and his eyes raising up as he asked, “D’you wanna hear how it— you wanna know how it ends?”

“Lay it on me.”

From behind the boy (who was taking up 90% of the screen by that point) Ritchie stuck his head out, his eyes squinted as he waved to the camera.

“Okay, so they all got ated by the ninjas—”

“I thought they got lost?” George asked. “Or… were they lost and then the ninjas ate them?”

“Yeah, okay, that was it. And they all got ated and then they blew up and it was really loud. It was just like this—”

To illustrate his point, Jason waved his arms in the air and screamed like a banshee, causing his father behind him to widen his eyes.

“Jesus Christ,” his older counterpart cried. “This is better than the  _ Iliad _ !”

Dhani turned to him, suspicious. 

“I thought you said you were stupid!”

“Did not.”

“Did too!”

“Did not.”

“Did too!”

“Boys,” Ritchie hushed. “Come on.”

Jason turned back to the screen with a smug grin on his face.

And in the video, after a full minute of waving his arms and screaming so loud child protective services might as well have to take him away— _ again _ —his younger self finally quit, his eyes squinted at the camera as he concluded. “The end.”

The camera shook, as did Ritchie’s head in the background.

And then, after a pause, George asked, “Were the dogs alright?”

Jason thought about this for a moment.

“Yeah,” he decided. “They were okay.”

His foster-father laughed, and in response, so did he.

And then, his legs crossed in the sand, his eyes squinted in the sun, Ritchie turned around to ask, “Hey, how much battery’s that thing got left?”

George shook it around a bit.

“Um… is there a way to tell?”

“Yeah, there should be a light. It’s red; it’ll start flashing if—”

“Oh, I think I see it.”

“Is it flashing?”

“Y—”

He didn’t have time to finish his sentence before the camera shut off.

“Those were the days, my friend…” the now fully-grown Jason sighed.

Ritchie crossed his arms.

And though he didn’t say anything as the next video was loaded in, he saw himself and his son perfectly in the void that was the television screen, with bags under their eyes and bruises on their knuckles from punching their walls.

He could sure say that again, Ritchie thought.

For a third time, the screen lit up, this time at a well-lit kitchen table decorated with none other than Ritchie’s famous pancakes, stacked high on a plate and accompanied by small bowls of lemon and sugar with which to top the things.

So it was either Shrove Tuesday or someone’s birthday, he thought.

And he quickly found out which, the camera focusing on a young girl too preoccupied with her breakfast to notice she was being filmed.

Sounding only somewhat—though still noticeably so—from behind the camera, Ritchie said, “Morning, Lee.”

The girl didn’t look up as she said, “G’morning.”

“Do you know what today’s date is?”

She shrugged.

“You don’t know?” her brother asked, drawing back.

“Still look like a cabbage patch kid…” he muttered from the future.

Again, Ritchie hushed him.

And on the screen, the girl finally met the eye of the camera, a coy look on her face as she answered, “Yeah, I know.”

“Then why don’t you say it?” Ritchie encouraged. “It’s pretty special, after all.”

She set her fork down reluctantly.

And in that voice only a child could manage, sounding like she was about to give a report in front of her classmates, Lee said, “Today is the eleventh of November, two-thousand and ten.”

“And what’s so special about that?” George asked, sipping on his tea. 

She tilted her head.

“Today’s my birthday.”

“And how old are you turning?”

“Six.”

“And I’m turning nine!” Jason butt in.

There was a short pause.

“Jason,” Ritchie stated. “Your birthday was two months ago.”

“Well, I’m still  _ turning  _ nine.”

His sister glared at him.

“Well,” she retorted. “It’s  _ my  _ birthday.”

“But it’s  _ my  _ house,” her brother argued.

“Ritchie, tell him to stop!”

The man sighed.

“Jay, just let her have this one, please.”

He muttered something unintelligible, and then, with as much energy as he had left—though it wasn’t much—Ritchie continued, “You excited to turn six, Lee?”

The girl nodded as she ripped into a pancake.

“Are you going to have a party?”

“Mm-hm.”

“Is it gonna be a party with cake?”

“Yeah.”

“What kind?”

“I dunno. One with sprinkles.”

“You want sprinkles on top?” George asked, tilting his head.

She nodded.

“Then sprinkles it’ll be,” he sighed. 

There was a bit of a pause then, and for a moment, the video was no video at all—no snapshot of any significant event in anyone’s life—it was just another Thursday morning, with pancakes on the table and a camera in front of them.

And then Ritchie muttered, “You really like those pancakes, don’t you?”

Lee was too busy stuffing her face to answer.

And just as the man began to laugh at this, the screen faded to black.

Again, Ritchie was able to see his reflection inside of it. 

But much clearer to him, on the other side of the sofa, he saw Lee’s. And for the first time in his life, he realized that she was no longer the wild but rewarding little girl she used to be—at fourteen going on fifteen, she seemed, more than anything, plain disinterested.

Something had changed inside of her, and where she used to turn cartwheels in the garden, in those days it took nothing short of a miracle to get her out of her room.

What that something was, Ritchie couldn’t say. He almost wanted to chalk it up to her hormonal brain playing its tricks on her.

But, truth be told, he wasn’t sure he  _ wanted  _ to know what that something was.

George was the one to snap him back into reality, a puzzled look on his face as he turned the next disc around in his hands.

“You’re goin’ in order…” he muttered, turning to Dhani. “Ain’t you?”

The boy beamed.

“Yeah! From worst to best!”

This earned a solid laugh from nearly everyone in the room, along with a snide scolding from George.

But Ritchie could only blink, hearing it, his mind cloudy and his voice groggy as he asked, “Goin’ in order of wh—”

Before he could finish his sentence, a bright white light filled the screen.

Against the shaking colors and lights, it was difficult to see the date in the corner.

Fortunately for him, however, his past self had him covered.

And as the camera panned up slowly from George’s feet, the younger, more lively Ritchie said in a low voice, “Today is the first of August… two-thousand and twelve.”

His eyes widened.

And at last, the lens came into focus over George’s chest, his hair covering his smile as his shaking arms held tightly onto what seemed to be little more than a mess of black hair sticking out from under a yellow blanket.

“It’s about ten in the morning right now… and in where else but beautiful Los Angeles, California?"

Utterly exhausted, a woman just out of shot muttered, “The traffic isn’t beautiful…”

And hearing this, Ritchie laughed.

“Not at all,” he sighed. “But I think I can deal with that for right now."

“Sure can,” George whispered, refusing to take his eyes off of the package in his arms.

“Oh yeah,” his then-boyfriend joked. “We’ve also got a baby.”

The woman in the background let out a groggy laugh.

“And his mum, of course.”

The camera shaking in his hands, Ritchie turned the lens to reveal her, in all of her morning glory, her eyes shifted to look out the window as she ran a hand through her hair.

Dhani’s eyes widened.

But noticing that the focus was now on her, the woman quickly smoothed out her locks, her posture lifting as best it could as she brought her hands just beneath her navel, a swift smile passing over her face, like a single cloud over a strip of desert.

“Would you like to introduce yourself?” Ritchie asked. “First name? Last name? Maybe a fun fact?”

She laughed, and giving a quick wave to the camera, she said, “Oh, certainly—Yes, good morning, Los Angeles. My name is Olivia Arias, I’m thirty years old, and if I could take a nap here, I would. Thank you, have a nice day, now go and point that thing at the baby.”

“Our baby…” George whispered, beside himself with glee.

And as the camera turned back to him, he couldn’t seem to contain his excitement, a smile on his face as wide as the river Nile as he pressed the child up against his chest.

“Would he like to introduce himself?” Ritchie asked, half-laughing to himself as he did so. “First name… last name… fun f—”

“Oh,” Olivia interjected, still woozy from the process of sliding the thing out of her. “He doesn’t know how to speak yet, he’s just a baby…”

That didn’t stop George though, walking slowly towards the camera as he spoke for his son.

“His name’s Dhani,” he beamed. “Dhani Starkey… and a fun fact about him is that he was born…”

He turned to the clock out of the shot.

“Nine minutes ago. It was ten-sixteen.”

He all but let out a squeal of excitement as he cooed, “And look at him! My God, look how much hair he’s got!”

“He has got quite a bit…” Ritchie muttered. “A lot for a baby, anyways.”

“We’ve got a baby!” George cried, voice dripping with excitement. “For heaven’s sake, Ritch, he’s a baby!”

Olivia shook her head just out of frame.

“Well, I don’t know what you thought he’d be…” she muttered. “But I think it’s a bit late to return him, if it’s not what you wanted.”

“No,” George laughed. “No, he’s perfect! I’m sorry—It’s just a lot for me. A lot to wrap my head around.”

“He was cryin’ earlier,” Ritchie added, if only for the sake of the camera.

“As a matter of fact, I was—and they were tears of joy.”

His smile so wide it was forcing his eyes to squint, the man then gushed, “Just look at him! He’s so little! And sleepy!”

“They usually are,” Olivia sighed. 

And as his fathers and mother went on in the background about being parents to a baby for the very first (and only) time, the older Dhani let out a gasp.

“Oh my God!” he laughed. “Baba, I found your wedding!”

Almost deadset in his excitement, the corners of his mouth ticking upwards like he was some daredevil about to barrel down Niagara Falls, George uttered, “Hand it to me.”

And as the boy pressed his weight into his knees, his body leaning forward as he held out the disc, there came a single second where he contrasted perfectly with the video, a single second in which the two Dhanis were side by side.

It was hard for Ritchie to believe he was looking at the same person.

He wanted nothing more in that fleeting moment on the sofa than to scoop his son up in his arms the same way he was doing in the video, to hold him close to his heart and swear never to let him go.

He wanted to murmur his perfect nothings to him for hours on end, to promise that he would take care of the boy, that he would do everything in his power to keep him safe.

But they weren’t nothings, were they?

They were lies from the mouth of a man wearing a mask of his former self.

The Dhani on the screen was a being completely separate from the Dhani in front of it, and the same was true for the two Ritchies.

And if there was ever any doubt of this at all—from any corner of the man’s melting mind—then it was cast away as the screen flashed a new date.

_ 24/08/2015 _

In that blue-doored house in Orrell Park, it was a special day—five days after Jason’s fourteenth birthday, twenty-three days after Dhani’s third, and exactly seven months after John had been released from hospital following his near-murder.

In other words, it was the perfect day for George and Ritchie’s wedding.

And however cruel, however ironic, however sweet it was, the video of it (a mixture of several videos taken that day and given to the newlyweds as a gift) began with Ritchie standing in front of his bathroom mirror.

They were right where they started—ignoring the larger room, the differently colored walls, the graying hairs in his beard, and the suit over his body.

“Today is the twenty-fourth of August,” he reported. “In none other than 2015, the year of our Lord…”

A blindsided grin appeared on his face, and with only the slightest bit of anxiety in his voice, he said, “Today I get married.”

“We get married!” George corrected from the other room. “Unless you plan on eloping with Ognir Rrats…”

His soon-to-be husband laughed, his cheeks flushing in the mirror in front of him as the camera shook.

“Sure,” he said. “We get married.”

“And John gets drunk!”

“Oh, why can’t you just let me have my moment?”

“I’ll let you have whatever you want, love. But John will pry it from you even if he’s dead and gone.”

There was an uncomfortable pause, and as the camera panned over to George, he asked in a low tone, “Too much?”

“Don’t worry,” Ritchie sighed, both to himself and the viewers. “John is nice and safe in Mimi’s attic.”

“It’s him you should be telling that to… not me.”

“Then maybe I will,” the man decided, taking shaky steps towards the bed. “She don’t bite, does she?”

“If she does, I’ve never seen it.”

Lee cackled, her hands clapping in front of her chest as she tilted her head to the left.

But George, trapped in the year 2015, paid this no mind as his nearly-almost-monobrow-but-not-quite furrowed.

“What?” he asked. “This is an interview now?”

“If you want it to be,” Ritchie sang.

“Very well then—give me a question, cameraman!”

He laughed before asking, “Are you excited?”

George scoffed.

“You kiddin’ me? Of course I’m excited, Ritch, I’ve been lookin’ forward to this forever!”

“What about it specifically?”

The man thought about this for a second, growing more serious as he considered the question.

And then, staring off into the wardrobe like it held some secret of the universe, he resolved, “I’m excited to finally call you my husband… and to change my name.”

He turned to the camera.

“That’ll wrap everything up pretty nicely, won’t it? We’ve got the house… we’ve got the kids…they got parents, I got my baby, and you got sober.”

He gave a soft smile.

“So I suppose all that’s left to do now is to get this thing over with.”

“And to enjoy it,” Ritchie added.

George nodded.

“And to enjoy it.”

With a brief cut then, the scene changed.

It was no longer Ritchie in front of the camera, but in front of it, a picturesque smile on his face as he stood arm in arm with his husband, his other arm busy holding a very young Dhani.

Zak and Jason stood at his side, their arms wrapped playfully around each other as they grinned.

And next to George was Lee, not smiling so much as staring into the camera with doe-eyes, her hands clasped at the top of her skirt.

“Oh God,” Jason whispered, disgusted. “I look like I got run over with a chess board…”

Everyone in the room hushed him.

For far too long a while, they all stood there like statues on the courthouse stairs.

And then, from behind the camera, Elsie asked, “How am I supposed to know it took the picture?”

Ritchie frowned.

“It should blink,” he called. “It’ll—trust me, you’ll know. There should be some kind of flash on the screen.”

“I don’t see that…”

“Hit the big white button at the bottom; see if that works.”

The old woman hesitated before saying, “There is no white button.”

“What?”

“It’s not white,” she repeated. “It’s red.”

Handing his son off to a somewhat blindsided George, Ritchie began to make his way down the stairs, his voice growing progressively louder as he explained, “Here—you probably took a video…”

“Oh dear… how do I—”

“Let me take it,” he sighed.

And as his face came into full focus in front of the camera, he lifted his eyebrows as if in greeting.

“This’ll be a good memory…” he muttered.

And with that, a distinct turbulence as he took hold of the phone, the scene changed again.

The camera was in the kitchen now, the quality visibly lower and the lights brighter as John rested his head on his elbow, facing right and seemingly unaware he was being filmed.

For about three seconds, that is.

At the fourth, his face crinkled like a sheet of tinfoil, his eyes squinting into slits.

“Oh,” he said, crossing his arms. “Hello there.”

“Afternoon,” Ritchie said, his smile audible from behind the lens. “Fancy an interview at this fine gathering?”

He laughed for a moment, shaking his head before answering, “Shit—hit me up with it, man.”

As predicted, he had been drinking.

But this didn’t matter to the man who hadn’t touched a drop of liquor in three years, and so he began, “Alrighty—what’s your name?”

“Paul’s better-looking mate.”

“And how old are you, Mr. Mate?”

“Younger than Paul, apparently.”

“I see. But how are you connected to the grooms?”

“Paul knows ‘em.”

Ritchie staggered through his laughter.

“And are you happy for the newlyweds?”

Just as the older Ritchie wondered why he bothered to ask his drunken friends their opinions on his marriage, John finally broke character.

“Course I am,” he nodded, reaching his arm out towards the camera. “Look at me—hey, no, really, Ritch, look at me.”

“I’m lookin’, John.”

“You are?”

“Always have been.”

“Then let me tell you something,” he half-slurred. “And I mean this: Ya done good, you crazy bastard. Found yourself a man who’ll meditate with you on the side of the stream, you dig?”

“Sure I do.”

John laughed.

“Course you do. You guys… I’m tellin’ you what, man, you guys got it good. It’s a good thing you found each other.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“Hell yeah, man. I’m proud of you guys.”

And then with a laugh, he pat Ritchie on the back, shaking the camera as he did so.

“Now that’s the last time you’ll ever hear me say that, so you enjoy it! It’s a once in a blue moon type of thing there. Got yourself a once in a blue moon type of guy.”

“Yeah,” Ritchie sighed. “I know.”

“Now go tell Paul his better-lookin’ mate says hi.”

The other man gave a short laugh, but was quickly cut off as the scene changed again.

The camera was level, unnaturally so, as though it had been set somewhere to simply sit and observe its surroundings.

And in front of it, standing under the kitchen light with those wide, street-dog-sad eyes of his, was Ritchie, a sickeningly familiar wide-mouthed and long-necked glass in his hand.

From the future, his stomach dropped.

“If I could have your attention,” he began, interrupting the chatter of the laughably younger-looking guests. “I’d just like to say a few words here.”

And once the room had died down (apart from a certain three daredevils, all under the age of six and all forgoing conventional etiquette to babble to one another about such important matters as their favorite characters on  _ Sesame Street _ ) the man drew in a deep breath.

“Thank you,” he sighed. “Now—if you know anything about me, and I should hope you all do, considerin’ this is my wedding… um… you’ll know that I’m not really a man for speeches.

“That’d be my husband,” he laughed, his cheeks flushing as he finally said the phrase. “If anyone.”

George gave an encouraging holler from the sofa. 

And continuing on, Ritchie said, “But again—this is my wedding. And I know it’s not really any grand affair, but I think that at the very least, I’ve got to say something.

“So, if none of you would mind… I suppose I’ll say this:

“Looking back on everything I’ve ever done, I think one thing stands out. And that’s that I’m kind of—and by kind of I mean really—stupid.”

This predictably caused a bit of an uproar, a mix of mostly denials and one confirmation from a possibly well-meaning John, but unstirred by this, Ritchie explained, “It was pretty stupid of me to think I could make it out on my own, no mum or skiffle band to keep me from sleepin’ on the streets—though the skiffle band hardly delivered on that one.

“And I found out pretty quickly, when I was twenty-two, that that was quite the problem. But lucky for me, I had quite the solution, and living reasonably close to some of the universities, it didn’t take too long for me to find someone that was willing to keep his onions in a separate, blocked off section of the fridge.

“And maybe you’ve guessed it by now, but his name was George Harrison. And being the kind of guy that actually went to university, he was—and still is—pretty damn smart. 

“I guess you could say we compliment each other, really. He knows how to read and everything.”

George’s head tilted, his eyes asking his husband, without any words, why he had to be so hard on himself on his wedding day. 

And recognizing this, Ritchie toned it down a notch, going on, “But honestly—I think a big part of why we work so well together is because he’s pretty good at the things I don’t know how to do.

“I’ve said it before, but it still holds—and maybe it’s prophetic, considering the whole point we met was for him to keep me from financial ruin—George, you’ve saved me from everything under the sun and probably more. 

“It was ‘cos of you that I didn’t have to move back in with my parents, it was you that convinced me to get a job at the post—for heaven’s sake, you’re the guy that stayed up with me all night when I couldn’t sleep.”

He took a deep breath in.

“And now, after nineteen years, a house, a shop, three kids, and a baby, I can honestly say that you’re the man that saved my life. 

“You might notice that I’m drinkin’ cola from a wine glass, if you’re real observant. And I know it might seem like it, but trust me when I tell you that I haven’t lost my mind— _ yet _ . 

“There are two reasons for it, really. The first is just that it feels fancy, and that’s just how I like to feel, wearin’ a suit and all. But, uh… much more worthy of a speech is the second reason, which wouldn’t be a reason at all if it wasn’t for George.”

He paused, and then, in a tone just serious enough to make the moment memorable, but not so much to make anyone worry, he added, “For that matter, I don’t know if I’d be here at all if it wasn’t for him.

“I’m a long way off from countin’ days, now, but just for today, I thought I would.

“And as of today,” he concluded. “I’ve been sober for three years and eight months.”

But three years later, in the Starkeys’ living room, the tension was so real you could taste it, bitter and sour as a bad batch of wine, causing everyone inside to cringe out of their skins.

How in God’s name, Ritchie wondered, was he ever able to stand up and say something like that in front of everyone he had ever met?

He almost didn’t believe he was sober in that clip.

But his shame and pride, though it wasn’t in any way unexpected, his speech was met with roaring applause.

He thanked his crowd diligently, his cheeks red as beets and split by the widest smile he could manage as he gave an insecure laugh to himself.

“I mean it, George,” he concluded, more emotional than he cared to admit. “And I mean it to Zak and Jason and Lee and Dhani—you’ve saved my life. All of you.”

Before the screen cut to a very cheeky credits scene (which John had insisted under threat of permanent estrangement be put in) Gerry Marsden crooning the unofficial but widely accepted anthem of Liverpool, Ritchie saw himself surrounded on every side by one of his family members in what had to be the world’s greatest group hug.

But sitting with them on the sofa, Jason picking at the acne on his cheeks, Lee dressed all in black, and Dhani far too big to be carried, it was a bittersweet thing to see.

Three years and eight months, Ritchie thought.

It was a good number—a great number, even.

Or it would have been, if the ninth month hadn’t been spent convincing himself that just  _ one  _ drink on just  _ one  _ night wouldn’t do him any harm.

Able to see his reflection in the television screen for the very last time, he wondered just how much the others realized he had meant those words, whether or not they understood that they were his life support when he toyed with the idea of blowing his brains out.

It seemed he wasn’t alone in his sweet and sour gloom, either. 

And he knew this because he saw, to his right, and much closer to the screen, an almost lost looking version of his husband, his glassy eyes creased at the edges by the scars of time as his chest rose and fell.

There were things said as the credits rolled, of course. 

Jason made jokes at his brother’s expense, sighing about how great the wedding was, and how much of a pity it would be if he wasn’t able to remember it.

Dhani fired back with complaints to his Baba, pulling on the man’s arm until George finally told his son to be “a little more sensitive” to the baby of the house.

And Lee’s phone began to ring, her voice like a bird’s as she piped up to answer it, leaving the room without a second thought. 

But when the credits reached their end, it grew quiet.

The kids were gone.

And for the first time in quite a while, it was just George and Ritchie in the room, the former sighing as he packed up all the discs Dhani had strewn helter skelter, and the latter sitting quietly on the sofa, staring into space.

After a moment, before all the discs had been boxed away, even, George made his way towards the man.

Before Ritchie could process anything, he felt the warmth of his husband’s arms around him, heard the sound of George’s breathing as he rubbed his hands over the man’s back.

It took a couple of seconds, but Ritchie eventually did the same.

And as he did, he was able to see the final section of their friends’ messy, silly, lovely little movie.

_ To George and Richard Starkey, and to their children, from  _

_ Linda, Astrid, Paul, John, Yoko, Elsie, and Harry. _

_ Walk on. _

It was good advice, Ritchie thought.

And maybe—just  _ maybe _ , for just a short moment in time—he would be able to take it.

There may not have been any sweet silver song he could hear at the end of the storm, but at some point, some three and a quarter years ago, there had been.

And something in him knew that he couldn’t raise the shovel over his skull until he had made a few more movies of himself and his family. 

He wasn’t sure what he would do in the meantime—he was never sure of anything—but what he was sure of was that, for the time being, he would take a lesson from the television screen.

For the time being, he would walk on.   


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [snacks are unable to be passed out due to COVID-19.]


	9. Another Step Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: Ma, get the camera—I’m even more famous than before!!
> 
> AHHH! Thank you to Celeste_Fitzgerald for shouting out this fic on tumblr! I live under a literal rock, and so didn’t see it until today, but honestly—you’ve made me feel like a star! I now understand the true meaning of the song “Act Naturally.”

Most nights, by six o’clock, Ritchie was the only person left in the shop, the one trusted to shut down the store and make his way home in time for dinner.

And he would spend that time wisely, sitting in his broom closet office with a stash of beer to keep him company as he punched out the day’s numbers and divvied up the day’s revenue.

_ Most nights _ .

Because on one occasion particularly, just before six, the man looked up to see his son standing in front of him, his hands in his pockets as he leaned against the doorway.

“Zak,” he called, admittedly startled. “What are you still doin’ here?”

“I was catchin’ up with Julian on his way out,” the young man sighed, taking a step into the crowded room. “We ended up talkin’ for a while.”

Setting his can of beer aside (if only to give the illusion that he was more focused on the conversation at hand) Ritchie pursed his lips. 

“What’d he have to say?” he asked slowly. “He do somethin’ he wasn’t supposed to, or…”

“No,” Zak huffed. “No, it’s not like that. But what he told me was that he was workin’ the register this morning, yeah?”   
“Yeah…”   
The young man’s face hardened, a certain accusatory anger in his eyes that Ritchie hadn’t seen in ages.

“And he got a call,” he said through gritted teeth. “From Sherry.”

The sound of the landlady’s name made Ritchie’s eyebrows raise, his stomach churning as he asked, wary, “What’d she have to say?”

“Well,” Zak sighed, taking a seat. “You should consider yourself lucky, if you ask me. It was  _ you  _ she was lookin’ for.”

“And Julian didn’t think to—”

“It was before you showed up. He tried tellin’ her to wait until you got here, but she told him it was urgent; she wanted him to pass it onto you.”

Ritchie’s brow furrowed.

“So why didn’t he?”

“‘Cos he hasn’t got the backbone,” Zak blasted. “And besides, I don’t mind doin’ it. Matter of fact, I think I ought to.”

“Then tell me,” his father demanded, leaning closer to the young man.

Zak nodded slowly, though his eyebrows did raise.

“I’ll cut straight to the point here,” he sighed. “We’re two weeks late on last month’s electricity.”

Ritchie blinked a couple of times, if only to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

“I know,” he said slowly. “But you’ve got to listen to me, love, we’re nearly there, ho—”

“No,” Zak pressed. “See, ‘cos I came in here earlier and I went through your papers—”

“Without asking?!” his father cried. “Zak, for heaven’s sake, you know you’re not allowed to do that!”

“And what I  _ found _ ,” the young man continued, raising his voice . “Was that we made enough in sales last month for you to be able to pay everyone  _ and  _ pay all the bills. And unless I’ve made some kind of error—and that could be possible, though I did check a couple times—ninety pounds went missing.”

Ritchie’s cheeks grew hot. “Well, I— Dear God, I don’t think you of all people should be the one tellin’ me what the numbers are. And I mean that in good faith, honestly. But I don’t think I should be trustin’ the one of you guys with dyscalculia to tell me about the bills. ”

But his son would have none of his excuses, a grave look on his face as he explained, “I’m not here to yell at you, Dad. But the fact is that if we don’t get that money in—the money we  _ should  _ have—Sherry’s gonna turn off the power.”

“Jesus Christ!” his father cussed. “You couldn’t have said that any sooner? What— has she given you a deadline?”

“Julian said Friday. But she specifically warned him that she’s not gonna take this much longer, and that if you want to keep the place, you’ve got to start payin’ for it.”

Ritchie froze.

“But— no, Zak, that can’t be! She can’t just— just kick us out!”

“Well, it’s what she said.”

“And how do you know?” the man pressed. “It was Julian she talked to, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

Ritchie stood up, cursing as he banged his knee against the table.

There was a bulletin board behind the register, and underneath all the fliers for local bands and vocal coaches, he knew that there was a list of all of his employees and their contact information.

“Dad,” Zak groaned, following him out of the office. “Come on, don’t call him.”

“No, no,” Ritchie insisted, scrambling through the ads. “I want to hear it from him. I’m not takin’ none o’ this he said she said junk.”

Zak put a hand on his arm.

And this was enough to finally draw his father’s attention, his pupils small as he turned to him, his head spinning off his neck.

“Listen,” the young man huffed, licking his lips. “We’ll figure all of that out later—what  _ exactly _ she said. But for right now, I need to know:”

Ritchie watched his lips as the words left his mouth.

“Where did the money go?”

“I don’t understand,” the man muttered, his tongue dry.

Slower, and in a higher pitch, growing more and more aggravated, Zak asked, “Where did the money for the power bill go? We had enough to pay for everything and everyone at the end of last month, and now all of a sudden, ninety pounds have vanished into thin air, and we can’t pay for electricity! 

“I don’t know if there’s been some kind of mishap or what, but if we had all that money, there’s no reason it should be gone now. There’s no reason Sherry should have called.”

There grew a sick feeling over the man on the receiving end of the question, like his skin was burning at the bottom of the sea.

It was foolish of him to have assumed he could have ever gotten away with it—in fact, he was certain that  _ someone  _ had picked up on his tricks by that point.

But of all people, of everyone who had ever worked and would ever work in that store, he thought, did it really have to be his own son—the one forcibly removed from a household where drugs were valued over his own safety—that confronted him?

An unmistakable pain in his eyes, coupled with the quick twitching of his cheek, Zak asked again, “What happened to the money?”

“I—”

Try as he may, Ritchie couldn’t get the words out.

“I’m not sure.”

Zak frowned.

“You’re not sure what happened to the money that you were in charge of?”

“I must have misplaced it.”

“You don’t misplace cash, Dad. No one does.”

“Well, then,” Ritchie laughed, his cheeks telling more of the truth than he cared to. “I’m not sure what to tell you except that I’ll get Sherry her money.”

“Just tell me what happened.”

“What do you want me to say? I’m tryin’ my best, you know!”

“I want you to tell me where the money went!” Zak burst, his fingers tense as he waved his arms. “You know, I might be stupid, and I might have shit for brains as far as maths go, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that  _ something  _ happened with the freakin’ power bill! And  _ you  _ were the last person to see the money, so for God’s sake—”

“Maybe I wrote it down wrong,” Ritchie defended. “Maybe there was some sort of mistake, and I wrote that we had more than we actually do! Did you ever think of that?”

Under the scrutiny, his son flinched.

“Dad,” he sighed. “I don’t want to argue with you.”

“Then how about you just go home and you say hi to Tatia for me. That sound like a good plan?”

Zak’s face deflated like some kind of pathetic balloon poodle.

“Don’t make me be the one to say it,” he begged.

“Say  _ what _ ?”

“I don’t— God damnit, it’s not rocket science, is it? You’ve drunk the money off! And— and now we can’t pay the power bill, and now Sherry’s gonna turn off the electricity, and you won’t even admit to it!”

The man stared at his shoes.

“It’s not like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s  _ not _ .”

Zak sounded like he was about to collapse as he asked, “Then what is it like?”

Ritchie shrugged.

“Hell,” he sighed. “I don’t know, but it’s— it’s not  _ that bad _ .”

“What’s  _ it _ ?” 

The man winced, hearing the question. 

It was like someone had drained all the life from his son’s voice.

Still, he found the strength to answer him, muttering, “You know… you take a little bit of what you’ve got, and you go out for a little while at the end of the week… it’s nothin’ serious.”

“Dad, I’m not that stupid.”

“And I never said you were,” Ritchie sighed. “But you’ve got to trust me here. It’s not that bad.”

“If it’s not that bad,” Zak countered. “Then why can’t you just take from your own salary to go and buy booze? Why’ve you got to take from the bills?”

“Can’t afford it.”

“But you can afford to have your shop shut down?” the young man deadpanned.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Zak, we’re not anywhere near that!”

“Sherry said this wasn’t the first time!”

“And maybe if I didn’t have her breathin’ down my neck all the time, it’d be the last.”

“You’re really going to blame the landlady for doin’ her job,” Zak asked, dumbfounded. “When  _ you’re  _ the one that spends your lunch hour tossin’ back beer bottles in your car?”

“Well, I could say the same thing about you and Julian! You think I want the whole alley smellin’ like an anti-smoking PSA?”

“It’s better than the manager smellin’ like a brewery!” Zak laughed, mostly out of pity. “You think we’re gonna get people to come back here when they’ve got a question about lessons and you come out your office shouting?”

“You’re exaggeratin’ that and you know it.”

“And you’re just making excuses.”

“I am not!” the man flamed. “Listen up, if I wanna sit in my car—not in my office, but my car—and drink a couple of beers at lunch, then that’s my own fuckin’ business!”

“But there’s the problem,” Zak cried, his hand running panicked through his hair. “It’s not  _ just  _ in your car, and for that matter, it’s not just  _ a couple  _ of beers! Good God—if anything,  _ you’re  _ the one that’s  _ under _ exaggerating!”

“Lord, you’re no better than your Baba...”

“So he’s tellin’ you you need help?” the young man asked, his shoulders slumping. 

“He’s tellin’ me to get my head outta my arse, if you’re so curious.”

“Well, then— _ shit _ —have you ever thought that he might be right?”

Ritchie sighed.

“There’s a verse in the Bible about that, you know. Says you’ve got to get the sand outta your own eyes before pushin’ it out someone elses’. So to answer your question, I think I’ll take my head out of my arse when George does the same. But ‘til then, I’m not budging."

For a short while Zak was silent.

And then, his head shaking, his fingers gravitating towards the scarred red patch of skin beneath his eye, he sighed, “That isn’t any way to live your life, though—waitin’ on other people to move before you do.”

Ritchie leaned over the counter, his eyes wandering of into the expanse of neatly-hung guitars on the opposite wall.

“Then I guess you’ve got a lot of life left to live.”

To this, he had expected Zak to respond with some kind of grumbled remark, a slight on him, maybe, before he moved on to some other topic, or else left the store entirely.

But to his surprise, as the words left his mouth, the air seemed to still. 

It seemed electric, almost—like the men were hairs on someone’s scalp being brushed against a balloon.

And then, in a low tone, his voice as thick and harsh as unsweetened licorice, Zak muttered, “I think I’ve lived enough of my life with addicts to figure out when they’re in denial.”

This gave Ritchie pause, the hair on his neck standing on end as he processed the words.

The two of them had always seemed to have a tense relationship, you see. And it’s not hard to imagine why.

The very day after the young man (then a boy) had moved in with his future family, he had witnessed his alcoholic foster-father have a mental breakdown, lock himself in his bathroom, and refuse to leave until all the hair was gone from his head—eyebrows and all.

He had reacted to this, to no one’s surprise, with absolute dread, a sort of fight-or-flight response leftover from his days living in a meth lab.

That is to say, after about nine months of living in the Starkey house, Zak had tried to run away.

It was unsuccessful, of course—Jason, being all of nine years old at the time, and the one person that the boy was actually growing close to, was quick to tattle on his foster brother—but it was still a very alarming thing to witness.

And even more so for Ritchie.

To him, it was a sort of slap in the face. It was the sinking realization, listening to George’s recap of his conversation with Zak (because he refused to speak to  _ him _ ) that he had, for all intents and purposes, failed as a foster parent.

In his drinking, and the subsequent denial of it, he had been shaping himself up to be no better than the very people that his son had to be taken away from.

But it was a necessary realization.

Looking back at it, that seemed to be the start of Ritchie’s path to sobriety; It had finally hit him that he was on thin ice over a wine-red lake.

That, of course, coupled with the desire to see George finally have his baby—which, for reasons relating to international and domestic surrogacy law, and the restrictions thereof, had to take place in the United States. 

Which meant that Ritchie, being the non-biological father, would have to  _ internationally  _ adopt the child, the requirements of which were far more strict, involved longer periods of home study, and above all, could not and  _ would not  _ happen if it was discovered that the man was a belligerent alcoholic with no intention to change.

But how cruel was it that that same man was standing in front of his son again, distrust in his eyes as he compared the life he had been thrown into against his will to the one that was supposed to be better?

How cruel was it that after nine years of calling Zak a part of his family, after nine years of appointments in therapist’s offices, after nine years of muted conversations about that part of the boy’s life he could never run away from, no matter how hard he tried, Ritchie’s relationship with Zak seemed to be moving backwards?

“I’m not denying anything,” he finally whispered.

Zak sounded more tired than anything else as he asked, “Do you really think that? Still?”

“Well,” Ritchie sighed. “I’ve got no intention to lie to you about my drinking; there wouldn’t be any reason for it. I’m not gonna sit here and tell you it’s glamorous, but I’m not gonna tell you it’s ruining my life, either.”

“No?”

“No—I can’t. It wouldn’t be true.”

Zak tilted his head.

And not meeting his father’s eyes, he said, “Tell me the truth, then.”

Ritchie was about to ask what exactly he meant.

But before he could, Zak looked up at him.

“Tell me to my face that you’re an alcoholic.”

Ritchie tensed, a grimace on his face as he stammered out, “Well, I wouldn’t say  _ that  _ exactly…”

“And why not?” Zak challenged. “You don’t think it’s gotten bad enough for you to say you’re an addict? Or is it just cognitive dissonance?”

“Come on, now.”

“No, no, I want to know. If you’re not an alcoholic now, but you were in the past, then what would make you one? At what point would you be able to say that you are?”

The corner of Ritchie’s lips drew back, a slight squint obscuring his eyes.

“What in God’s name do you expect me to say to that?”

Zak squinted.

“Well, what’s an alcoholic to you? Is it someone who drinks their feelings away? Or is it someone who’s drunk so many of their feelings that they’re in crippling financial ruin? If you don’t have it bad enough, then how bad does it have to be before someone can  _ really _ say tha—”

Ritchie cursed himself.

He should have known better than to challenge someone whose favorite subject in school was English.

“Listen,” he warned. “I’m not gonna stand here and argue about semantics. I’ve got numbers to crunch back in m—”

“Does it sound like I’m trying to argue with you?” Zak asked.

His father paused before mumbling, “Actually, yes. That’s exactly what it sounds like—that you’re tryin’ to bait me into fighting with you. I mean… good God, Zak, it’s verbatim.

And hearing this, the young man drew his arms up.

“It’s not my intent,” he explained, taking a deep breath. “I just want to know, because I’ve seen people in your shoes, and I’ve been in your shoes—and the thing that keeps us together is that we all start out pretending we’re fine. So tell me: if you’re not an alcoholic, then who is?”

Ritchie’s shoulders slumped down so far he swore he could feel the flames of Hell brush against them.

“Fine!” he huffed. “Fine, if you want me to say it, then I will—Maybe I’m an alcoholic. Maybe I’m an alcoholic bastard tryin’ to hold on to a failing music shop, maybe I’ve got the brains of a bag of peas, and maybe I’m literally Hitler. Now will you leave?”

For a long time, Zak was silent.

And then, with a sigh and a slump of his shoulders, recognizing that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with the man, and understanding that he didn’t have the patience nor time to pick an uphill battle, he began to walk away.

“I guess I will,” he said. “I’ll… I’ll see you tomorrow.”

But as he reached for his jacket, his cheeks red and scarred, his hand froze.

Ritchie watched as it shrunk back to his side, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he turned back to face the man.

It seemed for a moment that Zak was going to try and give his father some well-needed advice.

But in typical Zak fashion—or really, in the typical fashion of ADHD—he seemed to lose his train of thought.

After a pause, he returned to the original topic of conversation:

“What are you going to do about the power bill?”

Ritchie cast his gaze towards the ceiling, like maybe he thought God would slide him a stack of pounds.

“I’ll figure somethin’ out,” he muttered. “I guess I’ll just do the same as always.”

Zak frowned.

“Well… what’ll that be?” 

“You really want to know?”

“I-I’m not sure.”

Ritchie shook his head.

“I’ll take a little bit outta the bank. If the account’s for the shop, then it’s gonna be used for the shop.”

“That… look, I might not be the best at maths, but that just sounds like it’s gonna put you in debt.”

If he wasn’t the man he was, then Ritchie might just have laughed.

There was no punchline to the young man’s statement, really. The only thing punched was Ritchie’s financial wellbeing.

What was funny to him was the use of the future tense.

He wasn’t  _ going  _ to be put in debt—he was already knee-deep in it. 

It was another one of the cruel ironies in his life: just a year after he had finished paying off the debt from his first bout of alcoholism, he started to get himself into more, like cutting off the hyrda’s head.

And as of that day, though he didn’t have the guts (nor the skill) to tell Zak about it, he owed the bank a total of one-thousand seven-hundred forty pounds and one cent. 

He should know; he just checked that morning.

That was one-thousand seven-hundred forty pounds (plus one cent) down the hatch, spent on everything from wine to beer to whiskey to paying for the consequences thereof.

Truth be told, it didn’t make any sense that he was still taking from the shop. The original reason was because he didn’t want George to know just how much he spent on alcohol— _ that _ would have been a nightmare.

But George had given up his expectations for his husband a long time ago, and though the two never spoke of it, it was well-known between them that Ritchie’s spending and loaning habits were—to put it lightly—not ideal.

There was no reason, then, that taking from the shop should still have been necessary.

But Ritchie supposed his justification for it was this, foolish and shortsighted as it was:

The shop could close, and things would be hard. That was for sure.

But it would be infinitely harder if it was his own family’s account that fell apart.

“It’ll be alright,” he sighed. “I promise you.”

Zak’s fingers returned to his face, his cheek red and irritated.

Without missing a beat, Ritchie said, “You’re pickin’ at your face again, love.”

And without missing a beat, Zak removed his hand and apologized.

Not that his father was angry with him, of course. It had been Zak’s nervous habit for as long as they had known each other—without even realizing it, he would pick at his face until blood dripped down his chin.

Still, after so much time, he had gotten better with it. He had mentioned on the phone, even, that it had been a long time since he had done it.

It was a bitter realization—one not unlike that of his similarity to the young man’s birth parents—For Ritchie to understand that he was the source of his son’s stress.

But it wasn’t at all surprising.

If it was anything at all, then it was another step back.

Finally, after some discussion of the wife (or husband) and kid (or kids) which on Ritchie’s end, glossed over an uncountable number of slammed doors and arguments, Zak decided he had better be on his way home.

It was tense as he made his way out—there was some kind of change in the air, like something had just happened that could never be undone, like things were about to take a sharp turn south in their lives.

But hey, other than that, things were mostly normal.

Zak still insisted on giving his father a quick hug before he went out—a rare treat, but a welcome one—and like always, it was still raining.

The only other thing different was the young man’s message as he (once again) wrapped his arms around his father.

“Hey Da?” he asked, holding on just slightly longer than usual.

“Mm?”

“Can I tell you somethin’?”

“Always can.”

There was an uncomfortably long pause.

“I ain’t tryin’ to boss you around… or-or make you feel bad or nothin’...” the young man finally said.

Another pause, shorter this time.

“But you really, really,  _ really  _ need help. I don’t wanna see this place close down.”

“Oh,” Ritchie sighed. “Don’t you worry about that.”

“I’ve got to,” Zak said, peeling himself off of the man.

And looking into his eyes, he finished, “And for God’s sake, I don’t want to go through this all over again.”

“Go through w—”

But Ritchie never had to finish his question.

He could tell by the look on his son’s face.

It was a special sort of disappointment, that kind that only came with a whole quarter of a life full of half-hearted promises and cold-hearted let-downs.

“You won’t,” he assured, dead as a doorknob and serious as a stone. “Look, I’ll… I’ll take care of things. I’ll get everything sorted out.”

Tossing his jacket behind his shoulder, Zak could only mutter, “You had better.”

After driving home, eating dinner, drinking wine, digging his hole, and then finally crawling into bed, his mind mellowed out from the booze, Ritchie laid awake thinking about the ordeal.

His thoughts moved in slow motion, his hand on his stomach to keep it from swirling with worry for the fate of his and Zak’s relationship—or for that matter, worry for Zak, period.

But in hindsight, it wasn’t him that he should have been worried about.


	10. The Evening News

The evening news, for Ritchie, was a somewhat formal affair.

It was a part of his routine to come home, eat dinner, and listen to some airheaded man or woman babble on about the atrocious political situation the country had found itself in—or, as was also the case, and worlds more entertaining (not to mention tragic) the atrocious political situation the  _ United States  _ found themselves in.

And maybe it wasn’t a good idea to get angry about politics with a bottle of wine by his side.

But by that point in his life, it had become so ingrained into his day that he wasn’t sure what else he would do.

George would start tearing into him for something or other if he went into their bedroom.

Dhani didn’t want to see him.

Lee hadn’t left her room since 2015.

And truth be told, the man was just biding his time before Jason kicked him in the teeth and ran off.

So that left Ritchie to sit on the sofa and sip from his assortment of cans and bottles—undisturbed, if his family had any shred of common sense.

As has already been seen, this system (and with it, the maintenance of Ritchie’s temper) was entirely reliant on isolation. 

If for any reason he was disturbed by one of the other occupants of the house, or otherwise annoyed by them—even if the wind blew in the wrong direction and made someone’s dog bark, then in his drunken state, the man would lose his mind.

Not that there was much to be lost, of course.

Really, there were three ways a typical one of his nights could end.

The first (George’s favorite): At around eleven o’clock, after some very gentle prodding from his husband, Ritchie would stumble into his bed, sober enough to see where he was going, enough to sound relatively alright, but just drunk enough to sleep. He might even put Dhani to bed if he was in a really good mood, though it wasn’t often. It was more common, in this case, that the boy would stop by to give him a quick hug before George tucked him in—not the other way around.

The second (the most typical): Ritchie would drink himself to sleep, either on the sofa or in his bed, often leaving the TV on in front of him. It wasn’t unheard of under these circumstances that he would knock over whatever was on the counter, nor was it unheard of that in this state, he would shout and curse.

But that was nothing compared to the third (more common than anyone cared to admit—least of all Ritchie): The man would stay up as long as he possibly could drinking, losing any shred of the world around him as he slipped into the mud of his mind. Plates, glasses, plants, and drawers would be strung about all over the place; everything was fair game for Ritchie’s wrath. And this understandably led to George yelling at him, trying in vain to calm him down as the two exchanged insults and arguments for an unspecified amount of time.

In short—those were the nights Ritchie never remembered. 

They were the mornings he woke up on the living room floor, George’s lips glued together as he held out a cup of tea to his husband, a single ember of resentment left in his eyes.

Now, preferably, Ritchie would never find himself in any one of those situations—it would certainly make everyone’s lives easier. 

And once upon a time, he never had to spin the wheel and take the chance.

Once upon a time, he would go to bed—in his bed—at a reasonable hour, putting his children to sleep on most nights, and occasionally waking up in his husband’s arms.

But by that point, by that night in December, that may as well have been some dream he had the night before.

And the dream, it seemed, was over.

Either way—those were the three main ways Ritchie’s nights would end: nicely, nonchalantly, or nastily. 

And of course, there were endless permutations of each, dependent upon a number of factors like phone calls and visits from friends, but for the most part, they were trivial.

I say for the most part because on that specific night, one particular event was anything but.

It would blindsight Ritchie and it would blindsight George.

It would be something that neither of them would expect—though they really should have. 

It would be something that changed the very dynamics of the household, and for that matter, the very dynamics of this story.

And it all started after dinner, while Ritchie was content in his living room watching the evening news.

He was at a point where he was still quite sober, and as a result, still able to pay attention to what was happening in the world and on the screen.

It was nothing exciting—a standard recall of the latest football games, followed by some updates on the state of the eternally promised (but never completed) Brexit, and then topped off with a warning of things to come “in just a moment, after these messages.”

And as the first commercial started to play, Ritchie let out a sigh he had been holding for some time.

His back ached as he stood up from the sofa, his hand above his waist as he moved towards the fridge.

He had finished another can of beer, and so the only logical thing to do about that was to go and grab another.

It was a simple enough concept to him, and though George, busy loading the dishwasher, might have disagreed, it was Ritchie’s life—he would be the one to decide what to do with it.

And he was lucky enough, as he opened the door, not to be the victim of another one of George’s passive-aggressive sighs.

Not because his husband took no issue with his drinking, of course, but because he took more of an issue with his own ringing phone.

Ritchie listened half-heartedly to his conversation.

“This is George,” the man sighed.

There was a short pause.

“Jason? Wha—whose phone is this?”

Ritchie pushed aside a covered plate of half-eaten aubergine to reach the pack of beer at the back of the fridge, praying it wasn’t frozen.

And as he did this, it struck him that George had gone an awfully long time without saying anything meaningful.

The few things that had left his mouth were little more than hums and  _ rights  _ and  _ okays.  _

But it wasn’t in that nonchalant sort of sense that would imply the young man needed a ride home—it was much more serious.

His hand cold as he wrapped it around the can, Ritchie turned around to see his husband’s face had gone pale, his lips still as stone and his eyes wide.

“What?” Ritchie asked, alarmed. “What’s happened to him? Is he alr—”

George was quick to shush him.

And blinking, he explained, “No, no… it’s only your dad…just— keep going, Jay.”

Ritchie drew back, watching with his feet stuck to the floor like gum on the bottom of a bus seat as George put a hand on his hip, his brow furrowed.

After an eternally long while, his face changed, his eyes squinting at the corners, deepening the wrinkles in his face.

It was almost funny, Ritchie thought to himself.

He couldn’t remember George having so many.

“ _ Jason Starkey _ ,” the man warned, stern as the Dickens and low-spoken as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. 

The thing was—he couldn’t get any words out other than those two.

For an uncomfortably long amount of time, he simply stood there in shock, gasps clawing their way out of his throat as his head shook. 

“Young man—” he stammered. “You ought to know  _ much  _ better than that!”

“Better than what?” Ritchie asked, concerned.

George flung his hand at him.

And that was how the man knew something very serious had happened.

Because George wasn’t one to get mad and lash out—he wasn’t like Ritchie in that respect.

He was a man with an almost saintly ability to keep his emotions in check at all times, resolving his inner conflict in the only ways he knew how—which, unlike Ritchie’s coping mechanisms, were extremely healthy and quite productive to society at large.

He would pray, he would garden, and he would meditate his feelings away.

He was strong where Ritchie was weak.

So to see him on the phone that night, growing so visibly upset that he smacked his hand at his husband—and not the other way around—it opened a Pandora’s Box of possibilities for Ritchie, one full of Jason in various states, be they stable or critical or strung out in the street.

There was a pause as the young man on the other end seemed to try and explain himself.

But George would have none of it.

“Jason, you are  _ very  _ lucky that it’s me you called and not your dad.”

Ritchie swallowed.

That couldn’t have been good.

“You would have called him,” George went on, his voice so low Ritchie wondered how the young man could possibly hear him. “And I tell you what, we wouldn’t be drivin’ out th—”

He was cut off then, no doubt by one of Jason’s outbursts.

“Oh, you’ve got a  _ lot of nerve _ , love, talkin’ to me like that!  _ A lot of nerve _ !”

There was a pause then, giving Ritchie ample time to watch his husband’s chest rise and fall.

For a split second, their eyes met, and for the first time, Ritchie was able to see the fear inside.

Tearing his gaze from the man, George shook his head.

“Wait, wait…” he sighed. “Just— what’s the address? Do you know?”

Jason took only a second to answer.

“Well, is there someone around?” George asked. “Could you ask th—”

He was cut off again.

And as he was, he rushed into his study.

Ritchie followed him—beer in hand—not really knowing what else to do, watching as his husband tore a sheet of paper from the drawer and wrote on it so fast it could have burned.

“One more time,” he said. “Just to make sure I’ve got it.”

There was another pause, George’s eyes scanning his hastily scrawled letters and numbers with that same unmistakable fear.

“That’s it,” he finally sighed. “I… I’ll be over in a little bit.”

One more pause.

George’s wrinkles creased his face.

“Oh, you’d better believe he is.”

He sighed then, staring at his paper.

And finally, he bid his  _ adieus _ , saying, “We’ll talk when we get there. In the meantime, take care.”

With that, he put his phone back in his pocket, and slid lifelessly into his desk chair.

For a moment, he did nothing but stare out into space.

Ritchie tried to get his attention, of course, waving his hand in front of the man’s eyes with eyebrows knit tighter than a Neapolitan family in the 1930s.

But it didn’t seem to work.

George was frozen still, his eyebrows raised high enough to become part of the water cycle, his eyes wide enough for a man to fall into them.

“Are—” Ritchie stammered. “Is Jason… okay?”

Just as quickly as it had begun, George snapped out of his stupor.

He stood up cursing, his movements frantic as he grabbed his piece of paper and began moving towards the coat rack, explaining all the while, “We’ve got to go.”

“What, have we got to pick him u—”

“We have to go  _ now _ .”

Ritchie followed him as best he could, though his pace was admittedly much slower—more confused, if you will.

“George,” he begged. “What’s going on? What happened to him?”

The man, throwing his jacket over his body and forgetting his scarf, seemed not to hear the question, hopping on one leg to put on his boot as he called up the stairs, “Lee?”

He didn’t receive any answer; she must have had her headphones in.

“Lee!” he called again. “Lee Starkey, please come out here!”

A door opened around the corner of the hallway at the top of the stairs, and from it rang out an uninspired, “What?”

“Lee,” George instructed, now sitting on the stairs to pull on his other boot. “Dad and I have to go pick up Jason—you’re in charge until then.”

“I thought he said Michelle was drivin’ him home!” 

“Well,” her father laughed. “He lied about that… Listen, we shouldn’t be gone long—just watch over Dhani for a little bit, and if we’re not back by half eight, you put him to bed, alright?”

There was no answer.

“Lee,” George sighed. “Did you get all that?”

Something was amiss in the girl’s voice as she responded, “Alright?”

“Alright,” her Baba repeated, hands shaking as he turned to his paper. “Ritchie, get your shoes on.”

The man did as he was told, but still having no clue why he was doing it, and growing increasingly concerned as to what that reason may have been, asked, “Why? Where have we got to go?”

George only shook his head, a terrified laugh escaping him as he answered, “272 Marsh Lane…”

Ritchie squinted.

“Where is—that’s the medical centre, innit?”

“Sure is, love. But we’re goin’ next door.” George laughed, horrified as he practically dragged his husband into the car.

“Why… what’s there?”

George rubbed his hand over his face.

“The police station.”

Ritchie was in such a state of shock, hearing this, that it took him a moment to properly respond.

It wasn’t until he and George were bolting out their front door, and throwing open those on their car, that he finally cried, “Jesus Fuckin’ Christ! What’d he do to end up there?”

George drew a deep breath in, trying his best to keep his composure as he drove, so as not to get in an accident and ruin things any further.

He was already seconds away from ending up in the station himself, what with the speed he was thinking of driving.

“The way he told it to me,” he said, shaking as he turned the key. “He just got busted tryin’ to steal car parts.”

“What the hell’s he need those for?” Ritchie asked, dumbfounded.

George smiled like a lunatic, if only because he didn’t know what else to do. 

“Well,” he began, voice about as strong as a sheet of ice on a cool spring day. “Accordin’ to him, he also got caught with drugs on him—”

“He  _ what _ ?!”

“—So make of that whatever you’d like.”

“He was doin’ drugs?” Ritchie cried, his face white as the paper between them. “What— why— _ why _ ?!”

George didn’t take his eyes off the road—and thank goodness for that—as he answered, in a simultaneously skittish and infuriated tone, “Maybe it’s got somethin’ to do with the fact that you ain’t ever there for him, I’m not sure!”

Ritchie’s face fell, hearing this.

But it didn’t stay like that for long.

His eyes were quick to squint, his mouth keen to curl like it had just tasted sour milk.

“Oh, hell,” he cursed. “Now it’s my fault?”

“I’m not sayin’ it’s your fault,” George snapped. “I’m just sayin’ they might be related.”

“How in God’s name is it my fault that you don’t keep an eye on your own damn kids?”

George’s jaw tightened so hard Ritchie swore it was about to pop off his skull, his teeth gritted and his voice raised as he began, “My kids?  _ Mine _ , Ritchie?”

“Well, I don’t know—it’s  _ your  _ name on the adoption certificate, innit?”

“But not yours?” the man asked, desperate. “Listen, I don’t know what kind of fantasy world you keep pretending you’re livin’ in, but  _ you  _ are his father just as much as I am, so I don’t wanna hear you runnin’ your mouth off about how  _ I  _ should have been watchin’ him—’cos I could say the same about you.”

“Then where the hell did he tell you he was goin’?” Ritchie hissed. “Did he tell you at all?”

“For God’s sake, of course he did! How do y—Ritchie,  _ you were there _ !”

The man drew back.

He didn’t remember that.

“You were fucking there!” George went on. “You heard him say it, he said: ‘I’m headin’ off to the bowling alley with Michelle, she’s gonna drive me home, I’ll be back by eleven.’”

He scoffed, his voice rising to levels only seen when he was  _ very  _ upset as he said, “Look, I didn’t know any better than you did that he was just— that he would go off and get himself into—God, into  _ whatever this is _ ! But I’ll tell you what, I don’t know why either of us should be surprised!”

“You thought he was doin’ these sorts of things?”

George laughed, if only to keep himself from crying.

“I wouldn’t say I  _ thought  _ anything. But it don’t take much more than a pair of eyes to see he’s been actin’ different.” 

He sighed then, a frustrated sort of pity in his voice as he noted, “Of course, I might as well be talking to a wall here—heaven knows you’re not one of those observant types.”

His husband furrowed his brow.

“Not for much more than wine…”

And hearing this, Ritchie’s face fell slack, his eyebrows lowering to an unamused, level line just above his eyes, his tongue just barely poking out from his beer-stained teeth.

“Oh,” he hissed, staring off into the rows of pubs and takeaways around him. “Won’t you stop it?”

“Stop what?”

“The freaking guilt-trips!” Ritchie burst. “You think I want to hear you raggin’ on me night and day about how horrible of a person I am? You think I wanna come home and listen to you making me out to be the villain?”

If he was not the God-fearing, traffic-law-abiding man he was, George might as well have stopped the car then and there.

He didn’t bother to look his husband in the eyes—doing so would not have been safe—but the sincerity in his voice was unshakable as he challenged, “And have you ever considered that you might be in the wrong here? For once in your  _ whole damn life _ , Ritchie, will you just admit you’ve fucked up?”

Ritchie threw his arms up.

“As a matter of fact, I’d love to! But I think I’ve gotta know what it is I’ve done before I tie myself to the whipping post, don’t I?”

George’s eyebrows lifted, etching deep, dark lines in his forehead as he raised his voice.

“You don’t know what you’ve done?” he asked. “We’re on our way to pick our son up from jail because he’s been doing drugs and stealin’ car parts, and you don’t have the slightest idea—”

“No, I fucking don’t! Jesus Christ, is it me you’re mad at or Jason?”

“Oh, believe me, I’m upset with both of you.”

Ritchie was half-tempted to smack the man’s arm. 

He wanted to rear him by the shoulders, look him straight in his eyes, watch as what little space there was between his eyebrows filled with wrinkles, and holding onto him so tight his knuckles turned white, screech, “Then tell me what I did! Not Jason, for fuck’s sake—what did  _ I  _ do to get your knickers in such a twist?”

Understandably, this was not possible to do in the confines of a 2014 Volkswagen Sharan.

But Ritchie was still able to yell that last part, and to that, George responded, “Well, let me ask you something—just go with me here.”

“Lord have mercy…”

“Jason’s been doing drugs,” the man began. 

“Clearly.”

“And people do drugs because they can’t face their feelings.” 

“Sure do, John.”

George’s eyes widened, so much so that they may as well have popped right out of their sockets.

With a frustrated sigh, barely able to hold himself together, he reasoned, “So Jason is dealing with his feelings by doing drugs.”

“Apparently.”

“Then let me ask you this—” George asked, pausing for effect. “Where do you think he  _ possibly  _ could have picked that up?”

Ritchie shook his head, “His friends, I’m sure.”

And hearing this, George actually laughed. 

“His  _ friends _ ?!” he cried. “His—Just—My God, you really can’t see it when it’s right in front of your face, can you?”

The man’s face contorted.

But it took only a second for the lightbulb to start buzzing over his head, singing his hair and burning his scalp.

“Oh,” he moaned, ever-sarcastic. “You’ll have to forgive me; let me correct myself—I am responsible for every single problem in this whole goddamn house, this whole town while we’re at it, and I should now be sentenced to death for my crimes. Woe is me, burning in Hell.”

Stopping the car as they approached the police station, George muttered, “And you say I’m the one dragging you on guilt trips…”

“Well, alright, Mister Know-it-all, you tell me what you want me to say—how about that?”

“I don’t want you to  _ say  _ anything,” George spat, his mouth filled with barbed wire. “ I want you to recognize that there’s a pattern here, and that  _ pattern  _ is that he saw you drinkin’ your problems away, which he saw and thought, ‘Gee, isn’t that just a swell idea?’

“There’s—there’s not any other way he knows of to deal with his feelings, ‘cos it’s all he’s ever seen you do!”

“Oh, come on, now, that isn—”

“And so,” the man raged. “Miracle of miracles, wonder of wonders, he did drugs to cope with ‘em! For God’s sake, Ritchie, it’s not rocket science! We saw the same fuckin’ thing with Zak!”

“Yeah, Zak wasn’t out stealin’ car parts from the bowling alley.”

“How hard is it for you to shut your mouth?!” George finally shrieked. “How hard is it for you to listen to me for  _ one  _ fucking  _ second  _ without hittin’ me with your smart-talk, huh?”

For a moment, the only sound to be heard was the heaving of the man’s chest, the only sight in Ritchie’s view was the rigid shaking of his husband’s head.

“I’m sick and tired of you actin’ like you’re younger than he is!” he shouted. “And quite frankly, I don’t think I’m askin’ for much when I tell you to listen to me, to… to just be there for the kids every once in a while, to go to bed before three in the morning…”

In an increasingly hoarse voice, the man concluded, looking his husband dead in the eyes, “Listen up—we wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for you and your goddamn drinking. So I don’t want to hear a  _ single word  _ of how you’re some kind of saint in all of this. Fact is, he picked it up from you, and now you’ve got to live with that.”

“George, I think you’re be—”

“ _ Not. A. Word. _ ” the man snarled through gritted teeth. 

For a moment, Ritchie was genuinely scared of him.

“Come on,” he said, his hands shaking as he undid his seat belt. “Let’s just—Good fucking God, let’s just get this over with…”

And so they did.

Pavement. Stairs. Door. Reception. Hallway. Door. Hallway. Cell.

It was all a blur to Ritchie, his mind moving at a thousand miles a minute through the walls of the station as his legs moved at a thousandth of that pace.

In his head, he was much further along than he was.

In his head, he was floating through the air, coasting like a hawk to its prey along the plain walls, his hair brushing the ceiling and his eyes unable to process anything around him—he was moving too fast to see.

But he was stuck on the ground; his legs could only carry him so far.

It felt like ages before he reached that cell—longer than he cared to count.

But when he finally got there, he saw that everything was white.

The walls, the floor, the bench, the door and the locks it had on it—all of them were a crisp, cold, uncomfortably clean shade of white.

The only thing that stood out among it all was the figure slouched on the bench inside, his eyes glued to the ground and his arms crossed as his cheeks flamed.

A permanent frown graced his face, his person having been reduced to little more than a t-shirt that proudly read, “Disco Sucks,” a pair of unevenly-cuffed jeans, and two plain, white, grey-toed socks, his shoes, jacket, belt, and watch having all been taken from him and stored in a bin just outside of his reach.

He didn’t seem ashamed

He hardly seemed embarrassed.

And he showed no signs of remorse for what he had done.

More than anything, Ritchie thought, he looked exhausted.

The man's blood ran cold.

_ He looked just like him. _

The only words exchanged as the officer unlocked his door and handed him his things came from George, a warning of sorts, spoken with a particular breed of disgusted coldness.

“Young man,” he swore. “You are in a  _ world  _ of trouble.”

Jason pretended he didn’t hear it, his face unchanging as he slid his shoes back on.

But the response in his own mind was loud and clear, one well-spoken after years of believing his Baba’s promises:

Likely story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that's it for the first part. I plan on writing five more--six if you're being technical. Either way, I hope you enjoyed it, and if you'd be so kind, I encourage you to check out the second part: "And Why Not You?" coming to an archive near you in about a week. I've just got to get some things in order first (get some practice for the next part, you know?) but after that, the madness will continue...
> 
> Maybe it seems like a bit of an investment, starting an angsty six-part series about some of the least explored characters in the fandom, but I hope this free sample's done its job. I'll do absolutely everything in my power to make those six parts worth your time. 
> 
> Thanks for stickin' around, and for the next week (or maybe less) I hope you'll be able to go on without me.
> 
> Peas and Glove,  
> Keir Moonrock


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